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During the Vietnam war, the United States used herbicides (including ‘Agent Orange’) in an effort to deprive the enemy of places to hide in forests and agricultural lands. In the decades after the war, reports on detrimental health effects of Agent Orange started coming out.

In this case, a Vietnamese organisation and several Vietnamese individuals did not sue the United States directly, but claimed that several chemical corporations by manufacturing the herbicides had violated national and international law. The Court rejected their claims based on national law, as under US law product liability against government contractors is barred.

Although the Court held that corporations can be held liable under international law, it also rejected the international law based claims as it did not find any international legal obligation which prohibited the US from using herbicides during the Vietnam war. The Court especially emphasised that the herbicides were not used with the specific intent to harm persons, but to ‘kill plants’. The Court held that since the use of herbicides during the Vietnam war had not been illegal, the manufacturers were not liable. The case was dismissed.

As part of an operation to prevent attacks on Israeli citizens, the IDF Military Commander in the West Bank issued several Orders to allow the IDF to detain groups of people for periods up to 18 days without the possibility to appeal to a judge or to consult legal counsel.

The Supreme Court held that the military commander is allowed to detain persons if they are considered to be dangerous to the security, but that this authority should be balanced against the liberty of the individual. The Military Commander’s orders allowed for detainees to be held for a minimum of 12 days without judicial reviews and this was considered by the Court to be illegal. Also, the Court stated that investigations should start in an earlier phase of detention. However, the Court also stated that the IDF could prohibit a detainee for meeting with his lawyer because of security considerations. All in all, the Court struck down the disputed orders. 

Who can be held responsible in a Court of law for human rights violations? In this case, victims and relatives of victims of the South African apartheid regime sued several corporations for their involvement in South Africa in the period between 1948 and 1994. They were liable, the plaintiffs reasoned, because the police shot demonstrators “from cars driven by Daimler-Benz engines”, “the regime tracked the whereabouts of African individuals on IBM computers”, “the military kept its machines in working order with oil supplied by Shell”, and so forth. The main legal issue to be solved by the District Court was whether it had jurisdiction over this case under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA), which allows non-Americans to sue in federal Court for a violation of a small group of international norms. The District Court ruled that this case did not fall within the scope of the ATCA for several reasons. They could not be qualified as state agents carrying out illegal state actions, business activities in South Africa during the apartheid era could not be defined as a breach of the ‘law of nations’ under the ATCA and neither could aiding and abetting to an international norm violation. 

In the period of April 1992 until March 1993 a large-scale armed conflict was taking place in the Foča municipality. During this time Neđo Samardžić was a member of the army of the so-called Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As part of this army, Samardžić committed and helped commit killings, forced people to relocate, forced women into sexual slavery, held women in a specific camp where they were raped, and persecuted (Muslim) Bosniak civilians on national, religious, ethnical and gender grounds.

The Court dismissed Samardžić' complaints that he had had no opportunity to (sufficiently) cross-examine the witnesses, as it found that he had been sufficiently able to cross-examine the witnesses and test their reliability. On 7 April 2006 Samardžić was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to thirteen years and four months imprisonment.

Warsame, a Canadian citizen, travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend Al-Qaeda training camps. On his return to Canada, he sent money to representatives of Al-Qaeda. The U.S. alleged that by attending the Al-Qaeda training camp and sending money, Warsame provided material support and resources to a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Warsame claimed that the provisions on the basis of which he was charged violated the U.S. Constitution’s right to freedom of association because it criminalized his mere association with an organization. The court rejected this claim, finding that the statute did not impose “guilt by association,” but rather guilt by conduct that amounted to providing support or resources.

The court also held the statute did not violate Warsame’s constitutional rights to due process and to a jury determination on each essential element of the offense.