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Anthony Sawoniuk was born in what is now Belarus, and was a convicted Nazi collaborator who took part in the murder of Jews during WWII. Sawoniuk later moved to the United Kingdom where he became a British citizen, this is why the War Crimes Act could be applied to his case. In the UK Sawoniuk lived freely until his name was found on a KGB list of war criminals in 1993.

After being put on trial for war crimes (murder) against Jews in Domachevo, Sawoniuk was found guilty by a jury in the Old Bailey on two charges and sentenced to life in prison. Sawoniuk appealed this judgment, arguing that the trial contained errors in law, and was therefore not a fair trial. It was mostly asserted, for several reasons, that the two eyewitnesses that were the primary evidence for his conviction were not truthful, and hence that the trial was based on unreliable and insufficient evidence. However, on 10 February 2000, the Court dismissed his appeal, judging that sufficient measures were taken by the trial judge to ensure a fair trial. In 2005 Sawoniuk died while in prison.

The Al-Aulaqi case is significant as it marks in all probability the first time that an American citizen has been killed by U.S. forces outside the borders of the U.S., without any trial, indictment or due process. The case revolves around Anwar Al-Aulaqi, an American-born cleric with dual U.S.-Yemeni citizenship who was a member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and had gone into hiding in Yemen, from where he regularly published videos propagating the jihad. The U.S. Treasury Department had allegedly designated him for targeted killing. Therefore, his father, Nasser Al-Aulaqi, filed a complaint claiming that the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of the CIA unlawfully authorised the targeted killing, and seeking an injunction prohibiting them from intentionally killing his son, except in case he did present a concrete, specific, and imminent threat to life or physical safety, and when there are no means other than lethal force that could reasonably be employed to neutralise the threat. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights intervened with a memorandum supporting Al-Aulaqi senior’s complaint.

The Columbia District Court found that plaintiff Al-Aulaqi, the father, had neither legal standing in court for his claims, nor that was the claim justiciable under the Alien Tort Statute. And if this was not enough, the Court also ruled that the political question doctrine barred it from adjudicating the case. On 7 December 2010, Nasser Al-Aulaqi’s complaint was dismissed on those grounds, while the defendants’ motion to dismiss was granted.

Anwar Al-Aulaqi was killed by a drone strike in Yemen on 30 September 2011.

Al Bahlul is a Yemeni national that has been imprisoned at the United States Detention Camp at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, since 2002. After over a decade of legal proceedings related to his role as a media and propaganda secretary in al Qaeda and his involvement in the 2000 Bombing of U.S.S. Cole and the 9/11 Attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, USA, the D.C. Circuit Court rejected his appeal for resentencing and upheld his life sentence.

While Al Bahlul’s legal team argued that the lower courts and the Military Commission failed to adequately reconsider his sentencing after his initial 2008 convictions were appealed and evidence of potential torture was introduced, the D.C. Circuit disagreed. It held that the CMCR adequately considered the appropriate sentence for the conspiracy conviction and that evidence on the grounds of torture was inadmissible because regulations on admissible evidence were stricter at the time of Bahlul’s original sentencing and he should have made that claim in the previous decade of appeals.