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In June 1944, German occupation forces in Greece massacred more than 300 inhabitants of the village of Distomo and burnt the village to the ground, as reprisal for a partisan attack on German troops. In 1995, proceedings against Germany were instituted before the Greek courts, by over 250 relatives of the victims of the massacre, claiming compensation for loss of life and property. The Court of Livadia, Greece, held Germany liable and ordered it to pay compensation to the claimants. Germany appealed to the Greek Supreme Court, on the ground that it was immune from the jurisdiction of the Greek courts, on the basis of state immunity.

The Greek Supreme Court dismissed the appeal and rejected Germany’s claim of jurisdictional immunity. The Court denied German immunity applying Article 11 of the European Convention on State Immunity, considered to correspond to customary international law. Moreover, the Court held that violation of peremptory norms would have the legal effect of implicitly waiving the jurisdictional immunity. It reasoned that torts in breach of rules of peremptory international law cannot be claimed to be acts jure imperii, concluding that Germany, by breaching jus cogens, had implicitly waived its immunity.

The principle of non-refoulement prohibits deportation of a person if there is a significant risk of that person being subjected to torture in the country of arrival. The principle has been repeatedly in the spotlights since 2001, as states came under increasing obligation to deny safe havens to terrorists. However, as this case proves, the principle was an issue even before September 11, 2001.

The Federal Court and the Court of Appeal rejected Suresh’s complaint against the decision to deport him. The Supreme Court held that the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration should reassess that decision, most importantly because both the Canadian constitution and international law rejects deportation to torture, as there would be a clear connection between the deprivation of someone’s human rights and the Canadian decision to expulse that person. Still, the Court did not exclude the possibility that in some cases, Canada may deport despite risk of torture. Also, the Court held that the Immigration Act had not provided Suresh with sufficient procedural safeguards.  

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni citizen, was Osama bin Laden’s driver. Captured in Afghanistan in 2001 by members of the United States Armed Forces, he was transferred to the United States detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in 2002. By an order of the President of the United States, Hamdan was designated to stand trial before a United States Military Commission for charges of conspiracy to commit multiple offenses, including attacking civilians and civilian objects, murder by an unprivileged belligerent, destruction of property by an unprivileged belligerent and terrorism. Hamdan’s counsel applied for a writ of habeas corpus alleging that the military commissions were unlawful and trial before them would violate Hamdan’s rights of access to a court.

In this decision, the Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia and held that Hamdan’s trial by military commission would be unlawful for a number of reasons: conspiracy, with which he is charged, is not a crime against the laws of war, the commissions do not conform to the requirements of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, nor with the rights guaranteed to Hamdan under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

In the second instance verdict of the Gojko Janković case, the Appellate Panel upheld the defence appeal only in the part of the legal qualification of the acts constituting crimes against humanity. It refused all of the other points of appeal entered by the defence, including the modification of the long term imprisonment of 34 years.

The case of Gojko Janković was the second case referred by the ICTY to the Court of BiH for further processing.

In 2001 the Presbyterian Church of Sudan filed a lawsuit against the Canadian oil and gas producer, Talisman Energy, under the US Alien Tort Claims Act, which provides US courts with original jurisdiction over certain tort claims filed by aliens. In the suit, it was claimed that Talisman aided the Government of Sudan in the commission of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. According to the claim, Talisman worked alongside the Sudanese Government in the creation of buffer zones around certain oil fields, which effectively assisted human rights violations and the perpetration of international crimes in order to gain access to oil by displacing the population living in the areas around the oil fields and attacking their villages.

The District Court of New York dismissed the claim on 12 September 2006. On 3 October 2009, the decision was affirmed by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.  The Court of Appeals held that, due to previous case law, it had to look at international law to decide what standard was applicable to establishing aiding and abetting liability for human rights violations. Turning to international law, the Court held that purposefully intending the violations, rather than knowledge of the violations alone, was the applicable standard. So, in order to determine liability under the Alien Tort Claims Act the plaintiffs must show that “Talisman acted with the “purpose” to advance the Government’s human rights abuses.” The Court held that the claimants had failed to establish that Talisman “acted with the purpose to support the Government’s offences”.