Search results

The heirs of a Palestinian landowner and the council of a Palestinian town sue two Canadian companies in Québec, claiming that by carrying out Israeli construction orders, they are assisting Israel in war crimes.

The Superior Court of Québec dismissed the claim, stating that the Israeli High Court of Justice would be a more suitable place to argue this case. Still, the judge did recognise that a person committing a war crime could be liable under civil law, for example a person who ‘knowingly participates in a foreign country in the unlawful transfer by an occupying power of a portion of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies’.

The heirs of a Palestinian landowner and the council of a Palestinian town sue two Canadian companies in Québec, claiming that by carrying out Israeli construction orders, they are assisting Israel in war crimes. The Superior Court of Québec dismissed the claim, stating that the Israeli High Court of Justice would be a more suitable place to argue this case. The Court of Appeal confirmed this, most importantly stating that this case essentially revolved around citizens from the West Bank and corporations carrying out work in the West Bank. Therefore, the Court held, it would require ‘a great deal of imagination to claim that the action has a serious connection with Quebec’. 

At the beginning of 2007, there were allegations that Afghan prisoners who were captured by Canadian forces and transferred to Afghan custody, were tortured.

On 21 February 2007, Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) filed a lawsuit against the Canadian Minister of National Defence, the Chief of the Defence Staff for the Canadian forces and the Attorney General of Canada in order to halt the transfer of Afghan prisoners. Plaintiffs specifically asked for a review of the Canadian prisoner transfer policy, and, in addition, claimed that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms should provide protection to the Afghan prisoners.

The case was dismissed. In March 2008, a federal judge stated that the Afghan prisoners have rights under both the Afghan Constitution and international law, but that they did not have rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This decision was upheld by the Court of Appeal in December 2008.

Al-Mahmudiyah (Iraq), 12 March 2006: in the afternoon, US Army Sergeant Steven Green and members of his unit Paul Edward Cortez, James Paul Barker, Jesse Von-Hess Spielman and Bryan Lee Howard were playing cards and drinking whiskey at a traffic checkpoint, when Green stated that he wanted to kill some Iraqi civilians because of the deaths of several fellow infantrymen. After Green persisted, Barker eventually agreed to go along with Green’s plan, and he told Green that he knew a nearby house where an Iraqi man and three females (his wife and two daughters of 6 and 14 years old) lived. Barker also suggested that they have sex with one of those females. Green and Barker persuaded Cortez and Spielman to accompany them (pp. 2-3). They secretly left the compound, approached the house of the Al-Janabi family, killed the father, mother and youngest dauther and proceeded to gang-rape the other daughter, Abeer Qassim Hamsa. After this, they killed her as well and lit her body on fire.

The fire was discovered the next morning by civilians; it was reported to the US army compound and investigations were initiated. Although the initial outcome was that the perpetrators had probably been Iraqi counterinsurgents, rumours started spreading that US soldiers had raped and killed Iraqi civilians. Eventually, suspician fell on Green and consorts.  barker, Cortez and Howard were tried by court martial where they pleaded guilty; they received prison sentences. Green, however, had been discharged from the army on 28 March 2006 due to a personality disorder. Hence he had to be tried by a civil court. The US District Court for the Western District of Kentucky sentenced him to life imprisonment. In appeal, this decision was upheld.