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Who can be held responsible in a Court of law for human rights violations? In this case, victims and relatives of victims of the South African apartheid regime sued several corporations for their involvement in South Africa in the period between 1948 and 1994. They were liable, the plaintiffs reasoned, because the police shot demonstrators “from cars driven by Daimler-Benz engines”, “the regime tracked the whereabouts of African individuals on IBM computers”, “the military kept its machines in working order with oil supplied by Shell”, and so forth. Whereas the District Court in first instance had granted the corporations’ motion to dismiss the case, the Court of Appeals ruled that the case could proceed. The District Court had ruled that aiding and abetting violations of customary international law could not provide a basis for jurisdiction. The majority of the panel disagreed, though for different reasons: one judge relied on international law to substantiate this, another solely relied on national law. A third judge dissented, arguing that this case should not be allowed to proceed, among other things because of fierce opposition from both South Africa and the US.

Mladen Drljača was born on 5 March 1958 in Bosanska Krupa in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995), he was a key official and held several offices in the municipality of Bosanska Krupa. Drljača was suspected of having committed crimes against humanity, war crimes against civilians, and war crimes against prisoners of war in the period between the beginning of April 1992 and 31 December 1992. In particular, Drljača was charged with participating in the detention of Bosnian Muslims in the Jasenica primary school and the Petar Kočić school, and in questioning the Jasenica detainees in the Provisional Military Court.

On 19 March 2008, the Prosecutor's Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina issued an indictment.

On 7 May 2013, Drljača was acquitted by the Appeals Division of Section I for War Crimes of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina because it had not been proven that he committed the alleged crimes.

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.

The Afghani Heshamuddin (or Hesamuddin) Hesam applied for political asylum in the Netherlands in 1996, but this was refused due to suspicion of his involvement in torture and war crimes during the war in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. However, Hesam stayed in the Netherlands, and after investigations he was arrested in 2004. The Hague District Court convicted him for war crimes and torture committed by him as head of the military intelligence agency KhaD-e-Nezami (KhAD) and as superior for failing to prevent these crimes from being committed by his subordinates. He was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. The Court of Appeal affirmed this decision. Consequently, Hesam appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that the previous courts had erred in law on several points. The Supreme Court disagreed, however, and held that Dutch courts had jurisdiction over the crime, that prosecution was admissible, that the crimes were not time-barred (as Dutch law excludes war crimes from becoming so), and that the convictions had been in conformity with the law. Accordingly, the appeal was dismissed.

After the takeover of Srebrenica on 11 July 1995, several thousands of Bosniak men fled and attempted to reach Bosnian territory. Many of them were detained and over one thousand men were brought to a warehouse and executed. It is up to the Court to decide whether 10 men who allegedly were involved in the capturing, detaining and killing of these Bosniaks can be found guilty of genocide.

These men were certainly not the genocide masterminds, but members of a police force. The Court states that in a case of genocide, a distinction must be made between those who conceived and directed the acts of genocide (referred to as a joint criminal enterprise) and the common soldiers. Where the former group can be held accountable for all crimes that ensued, the latter group is only responsible for the acts they physically participated in. However, after the Court reviewed several witness statements, it considered Stevanovic’s presence during the transferring of prisoners and their execution unproven and his role in all this to be trivial. According to the Court, when Stevanovic became aware of what was expected of him, he was distinctly unhappy about and therefore he removed himself from the scene. As such, neither genocidal intent nor his participation in acts of genocide could be proven; the Court acquitted him from all charges.