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Post-apartheid South Africa continues to be faced with the difficult question on how to deal with past human rights violations. From 1999 until 2005, the South Africa Prosecution Authority attempted to have Wouter Basson convicted. Basson was head of the secret chemical and biological warfare project during the apartheid era. He was charged with a variety of crimes, including murder, fraud and dealing drugs. After several charges were dismissed and Basson was acquitted of all other charges, the prosecutor sought permission to appeal. He mainly held that the judge should have stepped back from this case, as the prosecution had accused him of being biased.

However, the Supreme Court of Appeal held that only the defendant could appeal against factual questions and the Court considered the question of bias to be a factual question. Other reasons given by the prosecutor for appeal were dismissed as well. For example, the Court held that the prosecutor should have appealed against the dismissal of several charges at an earlier stage. 

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.

In the morning of 20 June 1992, a group of armed soldiers entered the settlement of Hlapčevići and surrounded the homes of Serb inhabitants. Ramić ordered these armed soldiers to take persons out of their houses, tie their hands with a cord and search their houses. After that, Ramić ordered them to move to the Youth Center of the municipality. At a certain point, the men were stopped and lined up against the wall of a house. One of them was asked for information regarding hidden weapons and minefields. When the questions remained unanswered, the accused shot at him and at the other civilians. He also shot a second time when they were lying on the ground. Three men died instantly, and one succumbed to his injuries on the way to the hospital. Two were seriously injured.

 On 17 July 2007 by first instance verdict, Niset Ramić was found guilty of war crimes against civilians and sentenced to 30 years compound long-term imprisonment sentence.

The case came as a result of information that Afghan terror detainees transferred by the British Armed Forces to the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) were beaten and physically mistreated. Maya Evans, a U.K. peace activist, sought to stop that practice and brought a case before the British High Court of Justice. On 25 June 2010, the Court decided that there was a chance that detainees were indeed mistreated at the NDS detention facility in Kabul. Therefore, the Court banned detainee transfers to this NDS facility. Transfers to the NDS facilities in Kandahar and Lashkar Gah remained allowed, although the Court imposed a series of ‘safeguards’ and monitoring arrangements on all future transfers of detainees.

Charles Zentai is an Australian citizen, who is accused of involvement in the killing of a young Jewish man, Mr Balazs, in Budapest in November 1944. The young man was not wearing his yellow star, upon which Zentai allegedly dragged him to an army post and, with others, beat him to death.

In 2005 the Republic of Hungary asked Australia to extradite Charles Zentai. In 1944, there was no offence of war crime in the Hungarian Criminal Code. Although murder was a crime in the National Code in 1944, the Republic of Hungary did not seek the accused’s surrender for prosecution for murder, but for war crime.

On 12 November 2006, the Minister determined that the accused was to be surrendered to the Republic of Hungary. A judge of the Federal Court and later on the Full Court of the Federal Court required that the accused should be released.

On 15 August 2012, the High Court determined that the Minister could not extradite the accused, because the Treaty on Extradition between Australia and the Republic of Hungary determines that extradition may only take place for a crime that was an offence in the Requesting State at the time the acts constituting it occurred.