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After the Chilean military staged a coup d’état in September 1973, elected President Salvador Allende was replaced with a military junta, chaired by Augusto Pinochet. During his time in office, widespread human rights violations were reported. In this case, the plaintiffs sought to establish the responsibility of the United States, more particularly former National Security Adviser and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, for these human rights violations. According to several victims and family of victims, the United States played an important role in the military coup, for example by funding and assisting the military.

The District Court had dismissed the claim on its merits, but the Court of Appeals held that the Court did not even have jurisdiction. Under US law, claims regarding strictly political questions, for example regarding foreign policy and defense, are barred. The Court held that this claim regarded measures taken to implement foreign policy and that a judge should not rule on this. Questions regarding foreign policy, the Court reasoned, should remain strictly within the domain of politics. 

In March 2003, Phil Pritchard and Toby Olditch, peace activists, entered the bases of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and tried to disable the planes located there. They acted in an attempt to prevent a crime by the U.K. and the U.S., namely the preparation of a war against Iraq. Two other activists, Margaret Jones and Paul Milling, also entered the RAF base. All the activists were charged in the U.K. In their defence, they claimed that the actions of the U.K. and the U.S. were illegal. Their defence was rejected by the English courts because the alleged crime was a crime under international law but not under English criminal law.

Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was 15 years old when he was captured and seriously injured in a firefight in Afghanistan on 27 July 2002. The US accused Khadr of throwing a grenade that killed US Army Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer and injured two others. He was charged with murder and attempted murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing support for terrorism, and spying.

On 25 October 2010, Khadr pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder in violation of the laws of war, conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing support for terrorism, and spying, and was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment.

In spite of Khadr's young age at the time of his capture, the United States imprisoned him together with adults.

Khadr was the first person since World War II to be prosecuted in a military commission for war crimes committed while still a minor. His conviction and sentence were widely denounced by civil rights groups and various newspaper editorials. He has been frequently referred to as a child soldier.

After the fall of the Cambodian government in 1975, the Communist Party, under the leadership of Pol Pot, came to power and renamed the state the Democratic Kampuchea. An armed conflict broke out with Vietnam, which lasted until 1979. From 1975 until 1979, Pol Pot and the Communist Party of Kampuchea sought to establish a revolutionary state and introduced a policy of ‘smashing’ their enemies, a form of physical and psychological destruction that consisted of arbitrary detention, torture and execution. This policy was implemented at a number of interrogation centres, one of which was S21. Duch, a former mathematics teacher, was the Chairman of S21 responsible for extracting confessions and information, and teaching interrogation techniques.

In the first ever judgment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the Trial Chamber convicted Duch of multiple counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment, minus five years as a result of his unlawful detention by the Cambodian Military Court for eight years prior to his transfer to the ECCC. This was also the first case before an international tribunal to allow victims of the crimes to participate in proceedings as civil parties and claim reparations for the harm they have suffered. 

On 8 May 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered obliging all forces under German control to immediately cease hostilities. Twenty-one individuals, all German nationals, were tried and convicted by a United States military commission in China for violating the laws of war, namely by continuing to engage in, permitting or ordering military activity against the United States after the surrender of Germany. They were then transferred to a German prison and remained in the custody of the United States Army.

The twenty-one individuals, represented by Eisentrager, petitioned the United States District Court for the District of Columbia arguing that their continued detention violated the Constitution of the United States and they demanded a writ of habeas corpus, which is the right to be brought before a Court. The District Court denied the writ arguing that the petitioners were located outside of its jurisdiction. The present decision by the Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia reversed the decision of the District Court to hold that any individual is entitled to a writ of habeas corpus, an inherent common law right, where they have been deprived of their liberty by an act of the United States Government and their detention is in violation of the United States Constitution.