Mexican police have arrested the country’s former Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam on charges of enforced disappearance, torture and obstruction of justice. These charges relate to a 2015 investigation led by Murillo Karam into the 2014 disappearance of 43 male students of a teachers’ college located in the town of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero state. On the night [...]
Israel’s Beersheba District Court has convicted international NGO World Vision’s Gaza manager of operations of diverting funds from the organization into Palestinian militant group Hamas. Mohammad El Halabi was arrested and charged in 2016 with, among others, membership of a terrorist group, “ information to the enemy,” and embezzling aid funding to the tune of [...]
The Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court in Germany Thursday sentenced two Syrian nationals on war crimes and terrorism-related charges. Khedr A.K. was given a life sentence, mainly for shielding the execution of a detained army officer and membership of a foreign terrorist organization. His co-defendant, Sami A.S., was sentenced to nine years in prison, for filming the crime and preparing the [...]
The Warsaw Court of Appeal on Monday overturned the conviction of two noted historians, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, for libel. Grabowski and Engelking co-edited a two-volume, 1,600-page study published in 2018 titled “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland .” In addition to documenting cases of Polish assistance to Jews who [...]
The Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT) on Tuesday confirmed Ratko Mladić’s convictions and life imprisonment sentence by a Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Mladić, commander of the Main Staff of the Bosnian Serb Army from May 12, 1992, until at least November 8, [...]
Three organizations initiated legal action Tuesday against the European Border and Coast Guard (EBCG) Agency, or Frontex, at the European Court of Justice for violations of EU and international law. Frontex is responsible for coordinating border control between EU member States and other countries in the Schengen Area. The three organizations—Progress Lawyers Network, Front-Lex and Greek Helsinki [...]
The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina announced Friday that it had confirmed the indictment of eight former soldiers of the Army of Republika Srpska, or the Bosnian Serb Army, for crimes against humanity. Ilija Krčmar, Boško Učanin, Svetislav Račić, Željko Bajić, Nikola Ćuk, Nikola Ćuk, Marinko Miljević, and Dragan Despot are alleged to have persecuted [...]
A judge in Italy’s Catania in the Sicily region on Friday ordered that Italian Senator Matteo Salvini will not stand trial for refusing to allow migrants to disembark from a coastguard ship in July 2019. The right-wing leader had been accused of kidnapping the migrants. From June 2018 to September 2019, Salvini, the leader of far-right [...]
Inquests into the deaths of 10 people in Northern Ireland’s capital Belfast during a British Army operation in August 1971 concluded on Tuesday that all of them were civilians who posed no threat to the soldiers, and that the use of force by the army was “clearly disproportionate.” Between August 9-11, 1971, during The Troubles, in [...]
By a 2-1 majority, Trial Chamber IX of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Thursday sentenced Dominic Ongwen to 25 years of imprisonment for 61 war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ongwen is a former brigade commander of the African rebel group Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Ongwen was abducted by the LRA as a nine-year-old on his way [...]