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After the referendum on the independence of East Timor from Indonesia, violence erupted between pro-independence and pro-integration groups. On September 6, 1999 the Ave Maria church in Suai, in the Kovalima regency, in which civilians were taking refuge, was attacked by pro-integration militias Laksaur and Mahidi. The militias entered the church with homemade firearms and sharp weapons, killing 27 people.

At the time of the attack on the church in Suai, Herman Sedyono, an Indonesian Army Officer, was the regent or Chief of Kovalima regency and as such the head of government and the head of the regional authorities.

Before the attack a meeting took place at the official residence of Herman Sedyono. Herman Sedyono and the four other accused, Lilik Kushardianto,  Ahmad Syamsuddin, Sugito (Indonesian military officials) and Gatot Subyakto (a police officer) were all present at the incident at the Suai Church.

The Court found that grave human rights violations, in the form of murder as a crime against humanity, had taken place at the Suai Church. The crimes against humanity were committed by militia groups Laksaur and Mahidi. The Court found insufficient proof that the accused were responsible for the attacks on the basis of command responsibility. With regard to Herman Sedyono and Gatot Subyakto, the Court found that they were not military commanders or persons that effectively act as military commanders, as Sedyono was in function of head of the government and Subyakto was a police officer. The Court concluded that there was no organisational relation between the militias and the accused and that the accused had no effective control over the militias, so that the accused could not be held responsible for their actions. 

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 conflict in the former Yugoslavia, Milorad Trbic was a deputy chief of the Zvornik Brigade of the Army of the Republika Srpska. He participated in the genocide of Bosniak men in Srebrenica in July 1995 by. He did this by, among other things, firing automatic rifles at them during executions, and supervising and coordinating the detention and execution of Bosniak men at various sites in the area around the city of Zvornik.

Milorad Trbic was first indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). On 27 April 2007, the case was referred the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina for further processing, pursuant to Rule 11bis of the Tribunal’s Rules of Procedure and Evidence, taking into consideration the gravity of the crimes charged and the level of responsibility of the accused, and the standard of procedure in the country to where the case is referred. 

On 16 October 2009, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina found Trbic guilty of genocide committed in the Srebrenica area in July 1995, through his participation in a joint criminal enterprise (JCE). For criminal responsibility to arise via participation in a JCE there had to be a consistent and core group of actors with a common plan or purpose to commit a crime, with the accused to both intend and participate in the commission of that crime. The Court held that this was the case with Milorad Trbic. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.