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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.

On 22 July 2015, Burcu T., a Dutch national, was found guilty of violating the 1977 Dutch Sanction Law by transferring just over €2000 to an intermediary in Turkey as she ought to know the money would end up in the hands of terrorist groups. Burcu T. had been engaged to [T], who had informed her he was a member of the Taliban, and the court found that she ought to have known it was likely that the money she transferred would go to jihadist groups. In the same judgment, Burcu T. was acquitted of participating in a terrorist organisation due to a lack of adequate proof; the fact that the defendant was in a relationship with a terrorist and that she possessed documents, photos and videos linked to the jihad did not mean that she was a terrorist herself. She was sentenced to six months of imprisonment.

At the end of the Second World War, Tomoyuki Yamashita was a Commander in the Japanese Army serving in the Philippines. His troops were allegedly responsible for killing, torturing and raping thousands of civilians.

On 3 September 1945, Yamashita surrendered to the United States army. A US military commission tried him for violations of the laws of war. Yamashita was charged with having failed to perform his duties as an army commander to control the operations of his troops, thus “permitting them to commit” atrocities. He was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.

Yamashita appealed at the US Supreme Court, because the military commission had lacked many procedural and evidential protections. The Supreme Court denied this appeal. The Supreme Court ruled that even if Yamashita did not know about the crimes committed by his subordinates, because of his position as a superior, he should have known. Yamashita was executed on 23 February 1946.

The outcome of this case has been much debated and criticised, because of the claimed lack of evidence and the ‘should have known’ criteria as described by the Supreme Court. 

After the ‘Coastal Road Massacre’ of 11 March 1978 in Israel, the injured victims of the attack and relatives of the deceased attempted to take legal action in the United States against several non-state organisations and Libya, which they considered responsible for the attack. They based their action on, most importantly, a paragraph of the US Code which allows aliens to file action against an alleged violation of the law of nations or a treaty. 

After the District Court had dismissed their case, the Court of Appeals had to assess the plaintiffs’ appeal against this Opinion. It turned out that the Appellate Panel disagreed on basically everything except on the final conclusion: the dismissal was affirmed. Judge Bork denied the existence of a right to sue altogether, stating that nor the law of nations, nor treaties provided the plaintiffs with this right. Judge Robb considered the questions to be answered in this case too political to be answered in a court. Matters regarding the international status of terrorist acts and sensitive matters of diplomacy should be left to politicians, in his opinion. 

The Zadar County Court of Croatia, in its verdict of 24 April 1997, convicted in absentia 19 officers of the so-called Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) for the siege of the city of Zadar, which caused the death of at least 30 civilians and the destruction of significant parts of the city – including facilities and objects of large economic and cultural significance – without any military necessity to do so. The officers were found guilty of war crimes against civilians and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to prison sentences that ranged – depending on their military rank and degree of control over the campaign and, specifically, the targeting of unlawful targets – from ten to 20 years. However, as they had left Croatia before the initial indictment, the convicted persons have not yet been caught.