Search results

In the period of April 1992 until March 1993 a large-scale armed conflict was taking place in the Foča municipality. During this time Neđo Samardžić was a member of the army of the so-called Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. As part of this army, Samardžić committed and helped commit killings, forced people to relocate, forced women into sexual slavery, held women in a specific camp where they were raped, and persecuted (Muslim) Bosniak civilians on national, religious, ethnical and gender grounds.

The Court dismissed Samardžić' complaints that he had had no opportunity to (sufficiently) cross-examine the witnesses, as it found that he had been sufficiently able to cross-examine the witnesses and test their reliability. On 7 April 2006 Samardžić was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to thirteen years and four months imprisonment.

The Chagos Archipelagos are a collection of small islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Under British administration since 1814, they were home to approximately 1000 inhabitants by the 1960s who lived on and cultivated the land, educated their children and raised their families.

In 1964, the British and the United States governments entered into secret negotiations the outcome of which was the establishment of a military base on Diego Garcia, the Chagos Archipelagos largest islands. In order to do so, from 1965 until 1971, the population of Chagos was forcibly relocated: those who had left on trips abroad were denied re-entry, an embargo was put in place preventing the delivery of crucial food supplies and the remaining population was forcibly loaded onto ships and relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles.

The present civil suit is brought by the indigenous peoples of Chagos, their survivors and their descendants against the United States and a number of high-ranking individuals within the US Government whom the plaintiffs consider responsible for their forcible relocation. By a decision of 21 December 2004, the District Court for the District of Columbia held that the case was not justiciable as it required the judiciary to review political questions. On appeal, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the decision of the lower court. 

The decision is the first of its kind in France to hold accountable the French State and the national railway company, the SNCF, for complicity in the deportation of Jewish individuals during World War II. The case was brought by the Lipietz family who sought damages for the prejudice they suffered as a result of being deported from the city of Pau in southern France to the internment camp at Drancy, near Paris in 1944. They argued that the State and the SNCF were responsible because their deportation was conducted with the assistance of the SNCF and with the approval of the Home Secretary.

The Administrative Tribunal of Toulouse held that both the French state and the SNCF were complicit in the deportation of the claimants, having committed egregious errors and were accordingly fined a total of 62,000 Euros. 

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. The District Court acquitted Kouwenhoven of war crimes in first instance, stating that the link between him and those who actually committed the crimes was insufficiently substantiated. However, Kouwenhoven was convicted for his involvement in illegally supplying Taylor with weapons. According to the Court there was sufficient evidence that ships, owned by the OTC, within which Kouwenhoven held a prominent position, shipped weapons into the port of Buchanan, which was managed by OTC. These acts, the Court reasoned, did not only violate Dutch laws but also the international legal order. Given the serious consequences of supplying the Taylor regime with weapons, Kouwenhoven was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment: the maximum sentence. 

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.