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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.

Ahmad al-Y. was accused of two crimes: the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity and participation in a terrorist organisation. The court finds that the accused fought in Syria alongside the terrorist organisation Ahrar al-Sham and he is therefore convicted of participation in a terrorist organisation.

Unlike the Court of First Instance, the Court of Appeal does not find the suspect guilty of the war crime of outrage upon personal dignity. The videos show the accused spitting towards the deceased person and putting his foot near a body, while he was celebrating a victory over soldiers of the Syrian Government. Although the actions of him and his fellow fighters are disrespectful and distasteful, the court finds that this conduct does not meet the threshold necessary for this crime. The conduct is not degrading or humiliating enough. The victims are not severely suffering and are not displayed as a trophy.

The accused is sentenced to five years and four months of imprisonment, which is lower than usual, since the case took unreasonably long.

In October 1991, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia resulting in a civil war between the Bosnian Serbs and the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) in order to gain control of territory. The enclave of Srebrenica, near the border with Serbia, became a refuge for Bosniak civilians from nearby areas a Bosnian Serb forces obtained greater control over the surrounding area. A UN peacekeeping compound was based at Potocari in Srebrenica composed of lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers who were entrusted with keeping the area free from attack.

From 6 to 8 July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces attacked the Srebrenica enclave and shelled the township and on 11 July 1995, Bosnian Serb troops entered Srebrenica unopposed.

The Bosnian Serb troops proceeded to separate the women, children and elderly men from the military aged and able bodied males. The former group were loaded onto buses and transported to areas under the control of the Bosnian Serb Army. The men were hoarded onto separate buses and, in the coming days, were detained and summarily executed by members of the VRS (Republika Srpska Army) and police units including the 1st Company of the Jahorina Training Center of the Special Police Brigade of the MUP RS (Republika Sprska Ministry of the Interior). Some 40,000 people were forcibly transferred and between 7000 and 8000 men were executed.

Duško Jević, Mendeljev Đurić, Goran Marković and Nedo Ikonić all occupied leadership positions within the Jahorina Training Center with Jević being the overall Commander. The War Crimes Chamber of the State Court of Bosnia & Herzegovina convicted Jević and Đurić of genocide for their participation in Srebrenica and sentenced them to 35 and 30 years’ imprisonment respectively. Marković and Ikonić were acquitted. 

On 4 November 2005, a complaint was filed before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of people injured or killed during the bombing of the UN compound (an area protected by the UN) in Qana on 18 April 1996 that killed more than 100 civilians and wounding hundreds. The plaintiffs claimed that General Moshe Ya’alon, the head of the IDF Army Intelligence who launched the bombing, should be held responsible for the decision to bomb the UN compound.

On 14 December 2006, the District Court dismissed the case, finding that Ya'alon could not be sued because the Court lacked jurisdiction to prosecute Ya’alon (as he enjoyed immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act) and denied the need for jurisdictional discovery.

On 15 February 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the decision of the District Court.

In 1994, an armed conflict between the Rwandese government forces and the Rwandese Patriotic Front and the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of citizens in Rwanda and the elimination of approximately 75% of the Tutsi population.

Joseph Mpambara was a member of the interahamwe militia who fled Rwanda for Kenya and finally the Netherlands after 1994. He is charged with having murder, rape, kidnapping, hostage taking and torture against several Tutsi individuals including young children who were hacked with machetes after being forced out of an ambulance with their mother. Since the Accused is a non-Dutch national and the crimes with which he is charged did not occur on Dutch territory and did not implicate Dutch nationals in any way, the question of jurisdiction arose.

By a decision of 24 July 2007, the District Court of The Hague determined that it did not have jurisdiction to try the Accused for crimes of genocide as it lacked a statutory basis to do so. Further, it could not exercise indirect jurisdiction as one of the three criteria set out in the Dutch Penal Code was not met.