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On 14 August 1985, 60 women, children and elderly men were killed in the highlands village of Accomarca in Peru’s southern Andean region of Ayacucho. This massacre is known as the Accomarca Massacre.

The plaintiffs brought a complaint against Telmo Ricardo Hurtado Hurtado (Second Lieutenant (Subteniente) in the Peruvian Army) who was responsible for the command of the soldiers that committed the killings. The plaintiffs sought justice on behalf of all the members of the Asociación de Familiares Afectados por la Violencia Política del Distrito de Accomarca (Association of Relatives of the Victims of Political Violence in Accomarca) who lost relatives in the massacre. Hurtado was found guilty for the crimes committed in connection with the Accomarca Massacre.

On 4 March 2008, the District Court for the Southern District of Florida ordered Hurtado to pay $37 million in damages to the plaintiffs.

During the Second Liberian Civil War (1999-2003), Dutch businessman Guus Kouwenhoven owned the Royal Timber Corporation and had an important position in the Oriental Timber Cooperation. Corporations like Kouwenhoven’s were an important source of income for the regime of Charles Taylor, and a close financial relationship developed between Taylor and Kouwenhoven.

On 7 June 2006, the Dutch Public Prosecutor charged Kouwenhoven with war crimes and with violation of the national regulation which implemented international prohibitions of supplying weapons to Liberia. Although the Court of First Instance found him guilty of arms smuggling (but quashed the war crimes charges), the Court of Appeal later found that he could not be convicted for any of the charges due to lack of evidence.

The Accused in this case were Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, the directeur de cabinet of the Ministry of Defence, General Gratien Kabiligi, the head of the operations bureau of the army general staff, Major Aloys Ntabakuze, the commander of the elite Para Commando Battalion, and Colonel Anatole Nsengiyumva, the commander of the Gisenyi operational sector. They were charged with conspiracy to commit genocide, genocide, crimes against humanity, namely murder, exterminations, rape, persecution and other inhumane acts, and war crimes, namely violence to life and outrages upon personal dignity, for crimes committed in Rwanda in 1994. The victims of said crimes included a great number of Tutsis, the Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana and 10 Belgian peacekeepers. 

Bagosora was found guilty by the Chamber of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Kabiligi was acquitted of all counts, while  Ntabakuze and Nsengiyumva were convicted for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. After taking into account the gravity of each of the crimes the Accused were convicted for, as well as aggravating and mitigating circumstances, the Chamber sentenced them to life imprisonment.

During the 408 trial days of this case, 242 witnesses were heard, 82 for the Prosecution and 160 for the Defence.

Colonel Nicholas Carranza served nearly thirty years as an officer in the armed forces of El Salvador. Later, he was El Salvador’s Vice-Minister of Defence and Public Security from October 1979 until January 1981. In this period, the Salvadoran Security Forces carried out systematic repression and human rights abuses against opponents of the military dictatorship that ruled the country at the time.

On 10 December 2003, the Center for Justice and Accountability and the Tennessee law firm of Bass, Berry & Sims filed a complaint against Carranza on behalf of five plaintiffs.

On 18 November 2005, a jury found Carranza guilty for the abduction, torture, insult, imprisonment and killing of the plaintiffs. He was ordered to pay $6 million in damages.

On 19 March 2009, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the jury’s verdict.

Tharcisse Renzaho was a Rwandan army officer and waspromoted to the rank of Colonel in July 1992. During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, he was Prefect of Kigali-Ville prefecture.

The Prosecution had charged him with genocide, crime against humanity, and war crimes for his role in the relevant events of 1994. On 14 July 2009, the Trial Chamber of the ICTR convicted Renzaho for genocide, murder and rape as crimes against humanity, and murder and rape as war crimes. The Trial Chamber sentenced him to life imprisonment.

Renzaho appealed the judgment on thirteen grounds. He requested the Appeals Chamber to overturn the Trial judgment, acquit him on all counts of the indictment, and order his immediate release. In the alternative, Renzaho requested the Appeals Chamber to a lower sentence that would reflect his true level of responsibility.

The Appeals Chamber granted some of Renzaho’s grounds of appeal and dismissed others. It affirmed Renzaho’s sentence of life imprisonment, subject to credit being given to time already served.