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In the aftermath of the 1970 Chilean presidential elections, General Rene Schneider was killed as several military officers attempted to kidnap him. His sons allege that Henry Kissinger, then National Security Advisor to president Nixon, knew of the plans to kidnap Schneider and did nothing to stop it. The Court did not allow the case to proceed, stating that the claim made by Schneider’s sons could not be viewed separately from the context of US foreign policy at that time and that the judge should not rule on this. Questions regarding foreign policy, the Court reasoned, should remain strictly within the domain of politics.

The Court of Appeals agreed, refusing to differentiate between this particular alleged decision and the general tendencies of foreign policy in 1970. It therefore confirmed the dismissal of the case, stating that the Constitution had provided Congress with sufficient instruments to check the Executive’s conduct of foreign policy. It should be left to politicians to answer political questions, the Court reasoned, not to judges. 

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.

This case revolved around three individuals who were working in prison camps during the armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia in 1992: Željko Mejakić, Chief of Security of Omarska Camp; Momčilo Gruban, leader of one of three guard shifts at Omarska camp;Dušan Fuštar, leader of one of three guard shifts in Keraterm camp; and Duško Kneževic, who held no official position at any of the camps, but who regularly entered the camps at will, assumedly in search of information about the person who had killed his brother during the war. All four men were initially indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia for charges of crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture and other inhumane acts. However, in 2006, they were transferred to Bosnia and Herzegovina to be tried there.

After the case was separated into two, Fuštar, in his own case, entered into a plea agreement with the prosecution and received a nine year sentence. The other three were still tried together. The Trial Panel found them guilty and sentenced Mejakić to 21 years’ imprisonment, Kneževic to 31 years and Gruban to eleven years. They appealed against their conviction; the Appellate Panel partly granted their appeal, but mostly for insignificant parts, leading to Mejakić’s and Kneževic’s conviction and sentence to be upheld. With regard to Gruban, however, the Appellate Panel found that the first instance verdict did not properly take into consideration the mitigating factors – namely, that Gruban had in several instances helped detained people in order to at least alleviate their suffering – and reduced his sentence to seven years.

After the civil war in Papua New Guinea, which led to Bougainville obtaining a more autonomous position, several inhabitants of that island sued the mining company Rio Tinto, basically for its role in the war and the process leading up to it. The plaintiffs claimed that Rio Tinto’s mining activities had harmed their health and the environment, and that they had helped the Papua New Guinea government in, among other things, setting up a blockade with disastrous results for the population.

In this instance, the District Court had to rule whether referring the plaintiffs back to the Papua New Guinean legal system should be considered. The District Court held that this would be inappropriate with regard to the plaintiffs’ claims of war crimes, crimes against humanity and racial discrimination, as these claims are of ‘universal concern’. However, regarding other claims (of environmental harm, of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment and of consistent pattern of gross violations of human rights) the Court held that it could be assessed whether the plaintiffs should first exhaust legal remedies in Papua New Guinea. Therefore, it gave the plaintiffs one month to decide whether they wished to pursue these claims.  

Momčilo Mandić, who was Assistant Minister of the Interior of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in April 1996, was indicted before the Court of BiH in 2006 on allegations of involvement in war crimes against civilians and crimes against humanity committed during the armed conflicts that broke out in the former Yugoslavia in 1991, and which lasted until 1995. Mandić was accused of directing the attack against the Training Centre for Personnel of the BiH Ministry of Interior – one of the events that sparked the war – and of ordering (or at least failing to take reasonable measures against) subordinates to detain and mistreat several non-Serb civilians.

Mandić was acquitted by the Court in first instance, as it could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt that he had been involved in these acts, and neither could it be established that he was, indeed, a superior with the possibility to either order such acts to be committed or to take measures against subordinates who were about to or had committed the acts. The prosecution appealed, but to no avail; on 1 September 2009, the Appellate Panel upheld the acquittal.