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Ivan Timofeyevich Polyukhovich was born in the village of Serniki in the Pinsk region, Ukraine. Polyukhovich became an Australian citizen in 1958. In January 1990, a case was brought against Polyukhovich in Australia for his alleged involvement in the mass killing of approximately 850 people from the Jewish ghetto in Serniki village and for killing 24 other people between August and September 1942. Their bodies had been exhumed in June and July 1990. On 18 May 1993, Polyukhovich was acquitted because there was not sufficient evidence to continue with the case.

This case revolved around three individuals who were working in prison camps during the armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia in 1992: Željko Mejakić, Chief of Security of Omarska Camp; Momčilo Gruban, leader of one of three guard shifts at Omarska camp;Dušan Fuštar, leader of one of three guard shifts in Keraterm camp; and Duško Kneževic, who held no official position at any of the camps, but who regularly entered the camps at will, assumedly in search of information about the person who had killed his brother during the war. All four men were initially indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia for charges of crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture and other inhumane acts. However, in 2006, they were transferred to Bosnia and Herzegovina to be tried there.

After the case was separated into two, Fuštar, in his own case, entered into a plea agreement with the prosecution and received a nine year sentence. The other three were still tried together. The Trial Panel found them guilty and sentenced Mejakić to 21 years’ imprisonment, Kneževic to 31 years and Gruban to eleven years. They appealed against their conviction; the Appellate Panel partly granted their appeal, but mostly for insignificant parts, leading to Mejakić’s and Kneževic’s conviction and sentence to be upheld. With regard to Gruban, however, the Appellate Panel found that the first instance verdict did not properly take into consideration the mitigating factors – namely, that Gruban had in several instances helped detained people in order to at least alleviate their suffering – and reduced his sentence to seven years.

In early 1998, escalating ethnic tensions and violence led to the break out of an armed conflict in Kosovo between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Serbian and Albanian civilians were perceived as non-cooperative by the KLA and were subsequently targeted for intimidation, imprisonment, violence and murder. A number of Serbian military prisoners as well as Albanian civilian prisoners were detained at the Klecka detention centre by the KLA in inhumane conditions, exposed to cold, without adequate sanitation or proper nutrition. Prisoners were frequently beaten and a number amongst them were executed and their bodies buried in mass graves nearby. 

Fatmir Limaj, Naser Krasniqi, Nexhmi Krasniqi and Naser Shala were all KLA members; Limaj was the commander of the 121^st Brigade. They were indicted by the Special Prosecutor for war crimes and stood trial before the District Court of Pristina, operating under European Union supervision in Kosovo. All Accused were acquitted by the District Court.

On appeal however, the Supreme Court ordered a retrial of all accused and held that key evidence from Limaj’s deputy who had died in Germany the previous year would be admissible in the new trial.

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.