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Between March and September 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was attacking the Dukagjin area in order to assert its control over that territory. All three accused held positions within the KLA.

The charges comprised of crimes against humanity and war crimes, but Trial Chamber I held that the necessary contextual elements of the former had not been satisfied. Therefore, it dismissed all counts of crimes against humanity. It did further determine that war crimes had been committed by the KLA forces, but only found sufficient evidence for some of the allegations. Accordingly, it limited the counts for which responsibility could be attributed.

There was lack of evidence to prove the existence of a common purpose to remove the Serbian, Kosovar Roma/Egyptian and Kosovar Albanian civilians from the Dukagjin area, and, therefore, the three accused could not be held guilty for participating in a joint criminal enterprise.

The Chamber found only Brahimaj guilty of torture and cruel treatment and sentenced him to 6 years of imprisonment.

Milorad Pejić was born on 4 April 1969 in the village of Vukovar located in eastern Croatia. Pejić, who lived in the United Kingdom since 1999, was arrested in March 2008 at the airport in Belgrade when he wanted to bring a visit to his mother. He was charged with being involved in a horrific massacre that took place in November 1991. At that time, ethnic Croat prisoners were taken from the Vukovar hospital and subsequently brought to a pig farm in Ovčara, outside Vukovar. The prisoners were beaten, tortured and subsequently killed. Their bodies were buried in mass graves.

In 2006, Jennifer Harbury, the wife of ex-rebel commander Efrain Bamaca-Velasquez who was killed in Guatemala in the early 1990s, brought a complaint against U.S. governmental officials. Harbury claimed that her husband was captured in 1992 by Guatemalan army officers who were affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Harbury claimed that Bamaca was physically abused and tortured during his detention in order to extract information from him about the Guatemalan rebel forces.

Harbury’s tort claim was dismissed because the District Court found that it did not have authority to rule on it since the damage occurred in another state, namely in Guatemala. On appeal, the decision was upheld by the Court of Appeals. The Court ruled that the case involved political questions which are non-justiciable, and, in addition, that it lacked subject-matter jurisdiction to consider Harbury’s tort claim.

In this case appearing before the Criminal Division, the accused Dušan Fuštar was found guilty for crimes against humanity regarding his participation in the running of the Keraterm camp in Prijedor municipality. He was sentenced to 9 years of imprisonment after he entered a plea agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office.

This marked the first time that a case referred to the Court of BiH by the ICTY (in the case of Željko Mejakić et al.) was settled through a plea agreement. The Court found Dušan Fuštar guilty and sentenced him to nine years of imprisonment.