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On 1 December 2014 Ms. Shukri F., a young Dutch woman, was acquitted on two charges by the District Court of The Hague. She was charged with 1) recruiting people to join the armed struggle in Syria, and; 2) incitement to commit terrorist crimes and dissemination of and collecting inciting material. Although the Court acquitted her, the Prosecutor appealed. 

The defendant was allegedly active in spreading the virtues of Islamic orthodoxy in multiple ways. First, she used social media and gave lectures about Islam. Second, she encouraged multiple women (some underage) to marry and to depart to Syria. Third, she married a man who she supported in his wish to go to Syria. After he had left for Syria she divorced him and married another man, Maher H., who she also encouraged to depart to Syria.

The Court of Appeal ruled that it could not establish that the defendant recruited people to join the armed struggle in Syria. It could establish, however, that 2 videos she had posted on Twitter amounted to the dissemination of inciting materials. For that reason she was sentenced to a suspended imprisonment term of 6 months and a probation period of 2 years.

Following his initial conviction in December 2014, Maher H., the first convicted returning Dutch ‘foreign fighter’, was convicted again on 7 July 2016 and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment by the Court of Appeal in The Hague. Maher H., who the Court determined supported the jihad, had travelled to Syria in 2013, where he participated in the armed conflict. The Court found him guilty of: preparing to commit terrorist crimes, including murder and manslaughter; training for terrorism; and disseminating inciting materials, including via sharing videos, documents and posting a photo on social media. In contrast to his initial verdict, Maher H was found guilty of training for terrorism as he had, inter alia, acquired outdoor wear, searched the internet for information about the jihad and participated in the armed conflict. The Court of Appeal did find that these acts had a strong enough link to terrorist training. In contrast to the District Court’s judgment, it did not address the fact that this criminalisation could also potentially lead to the acts that constitute preparing to commit murder and/or manslaughter being punished twice. Similarly, the Court of Appeal disagreed with the District Court as it held that the uploading of pictures of jihadi flags did not constitute a direct or indirect call to commit terrorist crimes.

Ahmad al-Y. was convicted of two crimes: the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity and participation in a terrorist organisation. The court holds that the accused fought alongside Ahrar al-Sham in the Syrian Civil War and considers this organisation to have terrorist intent. Therefore, the accused is convicted for participation in a terrorist organisation.

The court finds the accused also guilty of the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity. Al-Y. can be seen in a video alongside other fighters celebrating a battlefield victory around a deceased person and putting his foot on the body of the deceased person. This conduct, in combination with other acts of the accused in the video, is humiliating and degrading enough to meet the threshold of this crime. In another video, in which the accused is roughly interrogating a captured soldier, this threshold is not met.

Ahmad al-Y. is sentenced to a combined six years of imprisonment, which is a relatively low sentence due to mitigating circumstances.

On 15 July 2015, German foreign fighter Harun P was convicted of membership in a foreign terrorist organisation and attempted murder in relation to his time in Syria in 2013 and 2014. Harun P had travelled to Syria in 2013 and joined the terrorist group Junud al-Sham. Subsequently, he confessed to participating in a large scale attack on a prison in Aleppo and to firing a mortar blindly into a populated industrial area in Syria. Since his return, he has distanced himself from his former views and cooperated significantly with the police. Harun P was ultimately sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment.

Eight inhabitants of the Northern Territory (Australia) who had been taken from their families between 1925 and 1944 under the Aboriginals Ordinance of 1918 (which allowed the forced removal of children of mixed Aboriginal descent), and a mother, Rose Napangardi McClary, whose child had been taken from her under the same law, sought a declaration that the Ordinance was unconstitutional. They instituted legal proceedings in 1995. In July 1997, the High Court rejected all their arguments and held that the Ordinance was not unconstitutional.