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The accused Ivan Hrkač is suspected of committing war crimes against prisoners of war and war crimes against civilians during the armed conflict between the HVO and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993.

At the present moment, Ivan Hrkač is beyond the reach of the judicial authorities.

Emmanuel Constant was born on 27 October 1956 in Haiti. He was the founder of the Revolutionary Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a death squad that terrorised supporters of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide who was overthrown in September 1991. Members of the FRAPH killed, put in prison, and abused supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide during the military regime that ruled Haiti between September 1991 and October 1994. Constant, as the leader of FRAPH, was convicted and found guilty for crimes committed during the military regime. He was ordered to pay $19 million in damages to three women who survived the crimes committed under Constant’s control.

We often associate genocide with the act of killing members of a specific group, of which there have been many devastating examples throughout history. However, according to the Genocide Convention, other acts can also be regarded as genocide, if they are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, specific groups. In this case, the plaintiff held that building a bridge to Hindmarsh in South Australia would impede on the culture and way-of-life of the Ngarrindjeri in such a dramatic way that it would lead to the destruction of this group. However, at that point, genocide was not a crime under Australian national law. The plaintiff therefore invoked legislation from the UK, arguing that application of this legislation was possible because of the fact that the UK preceded the current Commonwealth of Australia in governing the Australian continent and its adjacent islands. The judge did not accept this argument and reiterated that even when international law prohibits genocide, someone can only be found guilty of genocide if national legislation explicitly prohibits genocide. The claim was denied.

In 2002, with the adoption of the International Criminal Court Act 2002, genocide became a crime under Australian law.

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.