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The pronouncement of this judgment constituted one of the fastest completions of a trial of this level in the history of the Tribunal. Nizeyimana, the Accused, known as the ‘Butcher of Butare’, went on trial in January 2011. In 54 trial days, the parties presented evidence from 84 witnesses. During the proceedings almost 130 decisions were issued. The judgment was rendered just over six months from the parties’ closing submissions.

The Accused is a former captain at the Butare military academy called the École des Sous-Officiers (ESO). The Prosecution charged him with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for violence perpetrated in Butare prefecture, and, for the most part, in Butare town for mobilising ESO soldiers and others to rape and kill Tutsis, as well as other civilians.

Nizeyimana was found guilty of genocide, extermination and murder as crimes against humanity and murder as war crime. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

On 26 October 2010, a group of 20 Somalians, armed with machine guns and bazookas, violently attacked a yacht off the Seychelles. They hijacked the South African yacht ‘Choizil’ off the Tanzanian coast after it had left Dar es Salaam en route for South Africa. Because the South African authorities refused to prosecute the captured Somalians, five men who were members of the group were arrested and transferred to the Netherlands in order to be prosecuted.

On 12 August 2011, the Court of First Instance of Rotterdam convicted the five men for piracy and sentenced them for a period between four-and-a-half and seven years. The decision was appealed by the defendants to the Court of Appeal of the Hague.

One of the appellants was T21. On 20 December 2012, the Court of Appeal found that though the accused had not been able to call certain witnesses (namely, other suspects who had been captured together with T21 but were released afterwards), this did not violate his fair trial rights; T21 had been given sufficient means for his defence and the equality-of-arms-principle was found to have been ensured.

The Court of Appeal found the accused guilty for his intentional participation in a group that intended to hijack ships and use them for unlawful purposes and in unlawful ways. The Court further found that the accused had threatened persons on board of the Choizil with force, but, contrary to the Court of First Instance, it was not convinced that he had actually fired any weapon himself. Therefore, the Court of Appeal set aside the decision of the Court of First Instance and replaced it with a new decision on the facts that were proven. The sentence was reduced from six to five years' imprisonment (with credit for time on remand).

The case was the first time a criminal case, in which Somali pirates stood trial, was heard in appeal in the Netherlands.

On 29 September 2016, Amin Mohamed was sentenced by an Australian court to 5,5 years’ imprisonment for attempting to travel to Syria and fight there. Mr. Mohamed, a New Zealander, was convicted by a jury in October 2016 for booking flights to Turkey, and receiving the contact details of a man who would assist him (and others) getting from Turkey to Syria with the intention of fighting in the ongoing armed conflict there. In this venture, Mr. Mohamed had been assisted by Hamdi Alqudsi, another man convicted earlier in 2016 for assisting seven would-be foreign fighters with travel to Syria. Mr. Mohamed was prevented from undertaking this travel in September 2013 due to the revocation of his passport and will likely face deportation to New Zealand at the end of his imprisonment.

Mr Raslan was accused of committing crimes against humanity, torture, rape, sexual coercion, murder, and numerous other serious crimes in violation of international law. In 2022, the Koblenz Higher Regional Court convicted him for his part in Syria’s violent suppression of oppositionists and sentenced him to life in prison. Mr Raslan appealed his conviction on several grounds, which the present Appeals Order assessed.

First, Mr Raslan argued that since he was acting on behalf of the Syrian government, his actions should be immune to prosecution. The court disagreed, stating that acting under the direction of the state does not provide immunity for the commission of international crimes. Second, Mr Raslan argued that allowing the prosecution to read a UN Commission of Inquiry report to establish much of the factual background violated a rule that normally requires an individual to testify to their findings. The court disagreed and applied an exception that allows reports from public authorities to be read in court without calling the authors to testify. The court reasoned that the United Nations is to be treated on a par with any German public authority, and as a public authority, its reports are generally considered reliable. It also explained that the experts who drafted the reports would likely have little to add beyond what is already written, so requiring them to testify would be unreasonably burdensome without providing any real benefit.

Third, Mr Raslan challenged several of his convictions on multiple grounds. The court reduced a conviction of rape to sexual coercion because, at the time the crime was committed, the law required Mr Raslan to be physically present, which he was not. The court also overturned two counts of sexual coercion because those two crimes were already tried correctly in his conviction for crimes against humanity. In other words, he cannot be convicted of the same crime twice. Two counts of sexually abusing prisoners were reduced to aiding and abetting the sexual abuse of prisoners because, like his former rape conviction, the law at the time required that he be physically present, and he was not. Finally, his last count of sexual abuse of a prisoner was overturned and dismissed because the government only has five years after the crime to bring charges for this offense.

Mr Raslan’s sentence of life imprisonment remained unaltered.

In 1994, an armed conflict between the Rwandese government forces and the Rwandese Patriotic Front and the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens in Rwanda and the elimination of approximately 75% of the Tutsi population.

Joseph Mpambara was a member of the interahamwe militia who fled Rwanda for Kenya and finally the Netherlands after 1994. He is charged with having murder, rape, kidnapping, hostage taking and torture against several Tutsi individuals including young children who were hacked with machetes after being forced out of an ambulance with their mother. Since the Accused is a non-Dutch national and the crimes with which he is charged did not occur on Dutch territory and did not implicate Dutch nationals in any way, the question of jurisdiction arose.

In the present decision, the Court of Appeal of The Hague confirmed the decision of the District Court of The Hague that the Dutch courts have no jurisdiction over the crime of genocide allegedly commited by the Accused. This does not, however, bar prosecution of the Accused for war crimes and torture.