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Damir Ivanković was born on 26 June 1970 in Prijedor. In 1992, he was a member of the Prijedor police station and the police intervention platoon from Prijedor. He pleaded guilty of escorting a convoy consisting of at least 16 buses, tractor-trailers, trucks and truck-trailers carrying more than 1,200 predominantly Muslim and some Croat civilian, who were detained at the Bosnian Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp. Ivanković further admitted that when the convoy reached Mount Vlašić, he and other members of the police intervention platoon and the Prijedor police separated more than 200 men. They subsequently boarded them on two buses and brought them to a location called Korićanske stijene on Mount Vlašić, an area where there is a sheer rock face on one side of the road and a steep cliff on the other. There, Ivanković and the others ordered the men of the first bus to kneel on the very edge of the road above the cliff and subsequently fired at them. Some of the men jumped into the abyss hoping that they would survive. The men from the second bus were executed in groups of three. Thereafter, the accused threw hand grenades from the top of the precipice, and opened fire at the dead bodies and at those who jumped. In total, more than 200 men were killed and only 12 survived.

Ivanković was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

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.

After the ‘Coastal Road Massacre’ of 11 March 1978 in Israel, the injured victims of the attack and relatives of the deceased attempted to take legal action in the United States against several non-state organisations and Libya, which they considered responsible for the attack and which they considered guilty of torture.

The District Court did not assess the merits, as the Court held, most importantly, that the relevant provisions of international law did not provide the plaintiffs with the possibility to take legal action. In several parts of the opinion, the Court clearly stated its opinion that it is not up to the federal courts to judge on claims arising under international law, unless an international legal provision grants a private right to sue. A federal court should not be a substitute for an international tribunal and the judiciary should not interfere with foreign affairs and international relations, according to the Court.

Also, the Court held that too much time had passed since the attack to take the matter to court. Thus, the plaintiffs’ action was dismissed.  

The Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited was involved in extracting and development of oil in the Ogoni region of Nigeria. Concerned over the devastating environmental impact that Shell’s activities were having on the region, a group of individuals known collectively as the Ogoni Nine, protested against Shell’s activities. The Ogoni Nine were detained by the Nigerian military junta on spurious charges, held without charge, tortured and hanged following a sham trial before a Special Tribunal in November 1995.

The present dispute is a class action filed by 12 Nigerian individuals, now US residents, seeking compensation from Shell for having aided and abetted the Nigerian government to summarily execute the activists in an effort to suppress protests against Shell’s oil operations. Specifically, they allege that Shell bribed and tampered with witnesses and paid Nigerian security forces that attacked Ogoni villages. In 2006, the District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed the charges against the defendants for extrajudicial killing and violations of the right to life, security and association. On appeal by both parties, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that the Alien Tort Statute does not provide jurisdiction over claims for violations of international law committed by corporations and not individual persons. Accordingly, the suit against the defendants could not continue and all charges are to be dismissed.    

The crimes perpetrated by the Nazis during Hitler’s reign against Jewish citizens were some of the worst recorded in history. Although accurate figures may never be known, it is estimated that some 6 million Jewish individuals died – men, women, and children from all over Europe. They were deported from their homes in large freight trains in appalling conditions, others starved or froze to death, others still were taken away to concentration camps where the fit were forced to perform manual labour whilst the weak were shot to death or later, gassed to death in their thousands.

The Appellant, Adolf Eichmann, was an Austrian by birth who volunteered to work for the Security Service (SD) in Berlin. He rose through the ranks and eventually occupied the position of Head of Section (Referant) for Jewish Affairs charged with all matters related to the implementation of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. In this capacity, he oversaw the transport and deportation of Jewish persons, set up and personally ran an operations centre in Hungary in order to implement the Final Solution there, organised the transfer of money from evacuated Jews to the State and was responsible for the administration of the camps at Terezin and Bergen-Belsen.

He was captured by Israeli Security Forces in Argentina and handed over to the District Court of Jerusalem to stand trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people. He was convicted of all 15 counts and sentenced to death by the District Court of Jerusalem. His appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court of Israel and he was executed by hanging a few minutes before midnight on 31 May 1962.