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On 29 April 2008, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (BiH) first instance panel issued its verdict in the case against Paško Ljubičić, also known as Toni Raić, as he called himself after the war in the former Yugoslavia. Ljubičić was initially indicted for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other grave violations of the laws of war, allegedly committed by himself and by Croatian military police forces under his command in 1993, during the war in BiH. However, following a plea agreement, the charges were reduced to include only war crimes against civilians. Ljubičić signed the plea agreement, which the Court accepted. He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment.

In 1992, the so-called Mujahedin forces joined the military struggle of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Serbian forces. During three incidents between 1993 and 1995, the Mujahedin forces maltreated and killed both civilians and soldiers of the adversaries. 

Trial Chamber I found that these acts amounted to war crimes in the meaning of Article 3 of the ICTY Statute. 

When considering whether Rasim Delić could be held responsible for failing to prevent and punish these crimes, the Chamber found that he was guilty only with respect to the cruel treatment of captured Serb soldiers during the Livade incident. It found Delić not guilty with respect to the incident of Bikoši due to the lack of superior-subordinate relationship between those who committed the crimes and Delic. Responsibility for the last incident – in Kesten – was also rejected due to Delić's lack of reason to know that the crimes were about to be committed. 

Delić received a sentence of three years of imprisonment.

Under the authoritarian regime of Major General Barre in Somalia, the Somali Armed Forces perpetrated a number of human rights abuses against the Somali civilian population, in particular against members of the Isaaq clan.

The petitioners, all members of the Isaaq clan, allege that in the 1980s and 1990s they suffered ill-treatment at the hands of the Somali military including acts of rape, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention. They instituted a civil complaint against Mohamed Ali Samantar, the-then Minister of Defence and later Prime Minister of Somalia on the basis of the Torture Victims Protection Act.

The District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia dismissed the claim for lack of subject matter jurisdiction on the grounds that Samantar enjoys immunity from proceedings before courts of the United States by virtue of his function as a State official at the relevant time under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA).

By the present decision, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the decision, arguing that the FSIA is not applicable to individuals, and even if it were, the individual in question would have to be a government official at the time of proceedings commencing against him. 

Damir Ivanković was born on 26 June 1970 in Prijedor. In 1992, he was a member of the Prijedor police station and the police intervention platoon from Prijedor. He pleaded guilty of escorting a convoy consisting of at least 16 buses, tractor-trailers, trucks and truck-trailers carrying more than 1,200 predominantly Muslim and some Croat civilian, who were detained at the Bosnian Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp. Ivanković further admitted that when the convoy reached Mount Vlašić, he and other members of the police intervention platoon and the Prijedor police separated more than 200 men. They subsequently boarded them on two buses and brought them to a location called Korićanske stijene on Mount Vlašić, an area where there is a sheer rock face on one side of the road and a steep cliff on the other. There, Ivanković and the others ordered the men of the first bus to kneel on the very edge of the road above the cliff and subsequently fired at them. Some of the men jumped into the abyss hoping that they would survive. The men from the second bus were executed in groups of three. Thereafter, the accused threw hand grenades from the top of the precipice, and opened fire at the dead bodies and at those who jumped. In total, more than 200 men were killed and only 12 survived.

Ivanković was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

On 14 February 2005, a bomb in downtown Beirut exploded, killing 22 people, including the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon was established by the Security Council in order to prosecute persons responsible for the bombing.

In its interlocutory decision, the Appeals Chamber interpreted the STL Statute to require application of substantive Lebanese law as applied by Lebanese courts, but not before noting that binding international obligations, including customary international law, should inform any such interpretation. The Appeals Chamber held, inter alia, that not only does a customary rule exists between states to suppress terrorist act, but that terrorism is an individual international crime under customary law.

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon Appeals Chamber examined state practice and binding international covenants to assert that the crime of terrorism is “commonly accepted at the international level.” As such, the Chamber derived the key components in formulating a general definition of terrorism: (1) the perpetration of a criminal act; (2) the intent to spread fear among the population or coerce a national or international authority to take some action; (3) and the act involves a transnational element.  For the first time, a tribunal of international character has established the existence of a customary rule of international law recognizing an international crime of terrorism in times of peace.