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Zijad Kurtović, a commander of a military police platoon of the Bosnian army, was accused of involvement in war crimes committed during the war between Croatia and Bosnia (1992-1995). More specifically, he was charged with torturing and otherwise inflicting serious mental and physical harm to Croatian civilians and prisoners of war in a Roman Catholic church in October 1993, by beating them, forcing them to eat pages from the Bible, using and ordering others to use Croatian civilians and prisoners of war as human shields on the frontlines, and with forcing two detained HVO soldiers to perform an oral sexual intercourse. In first instance, Kurtović was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment.

Kurtović appealed on several grounds, arguing that the first instance Panel had erred in law (using the wrong law) and in fact (wrongly established certain facts). The prosecution also appealed against the sentence, which was, in its view, too lenient. The Appellate Panel partly agreed with Kurtović where it concerned the classification of the crimes. It could not be established with certainty which victims had been combatants; however, as it was evident that all detained persons were entitled to protection under common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and that they were to be qualified (as is usual under the law of war in case of doubt) as civilians. However, the findings on the facts remained further unchanged. Therefore, the Appellate Panel amended the conviction to only include war crimes against civilians and the wanton destruction of religious monuments. The prosecutor’s appeal was dismissed; the 11-year prison sentence was upheld.

Damir Ivanković was born on 26 June 1970 in Prijedor. In 1992, he was a member of the Prijedor police station and the police intervention platoon from Prijedor. He pleaded guilty of escorting a convoy consisting of at least 16 buses, tractor-trailers, trucks and truck-trailers carrying more than 1,200 predominantly Muslim and some Croat civilian, who were detained at the Bosnian Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp. Ivanković further admitted that when the convoy reached Mount Vlašić, he and other members of the police intervention platoon and the Prijedor police separated more than 200 men. They subsequently boarded them on two buses and brought them to a location called Korićanske stijene on Mount Vlašić, an area where there is a sheer rock face on one side of the road and a steep cliff on the other. There, Ivanković and the others ordered the men of the first bus to kneel on the very edge of the road above the cliff and subsequently fired at them. Some of the men jumped into the abyss hoping that they would survive. The men from the second bus were executed in groups of three. Thereafter, the accused threw hand grenades from the top of the precipice, and opened fire at the dead bodies and at those who jumped. In total, more than 200 men were killed and only 12 survived.

Ivanković was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

After the civil war in Papua New Guinea, which led to Bougainville obtaining a more autonomous position, several inhabitants of that island sued the mining company Rio Tinto, basically for its role in the war and the process leading up to it. The plaintiffs claimed that Rio Tinto’s mining activities had harmed their health and the environment, and that they had helped the Papua New Guinea government in, among other things, setting up a blockade with disastrous results for the population.

In this instance, the District Court had to rule whether referring the plaintiffs back to the Papua New Guinean legal system should be considered. The District Court held that this would be inappropriate with regard to the plaintiffs’ claims of war crimes, crimes against humanity and racial discrimination, as these claims are of ‘universal concern’. However, regarding other claims (of environmental harm, of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment and of consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights) the Court held that it could be assessed whether the plaintiffs should first exhaust legal remedies in Papua New Guinea. Therefore, it gave the plaintiffs one month to decide whether they wished to pursue these claims.  

Momčilo Mandić, who was Assistant Minister of the Interior of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in April 1996, was indicted before the Court of BiH in 2006 on allegations of involvement in war crimes against civilians and crimes against humanity committed during the armed conflicts that broke out in the former Yugoslavia in 1991, and which lasted until 1995. Mandić was accused of directing the attack against the Training Centre for Personnel of the BiH Ministry of Interior – one of the events that sparked the war – and of ordering (or at least failing to take reasonable measures against) subordinates to detain and mistreat several non-Serb civilians.

Mandić was acquitted by the Court in first instance, as it could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt that he had been involved in these acts, and neither could it be established that he was, indeed, a superior with the possibility to either order such acts to be committed or to take measures against subordinates who were about to or had committed the acts. The prosecution appealed, but to no avail; on 1 September 2009, the Appellate Panel upheld the acquittal.