Harboring Terrorists

As the head of the Somali army’s Fifth Brigade in the 1980s, colonel Yusuf Abdi Ali terrorised the Isaaq clans of the separatist province of Somaliland, ordering and often participating in the mass detention, torture and summary execution of countless individuals and supervising the destruction of numerous villages, the group says.

When Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991, Ali fled to Canada and later became a permanent resident of the United States.

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Efforts to bring him to justice will continue in an appeals court in Virginia on Wednesday (16 September) in a hearing that could have huge implications for the future prosecution of other alleged war criminals living in the US.

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Ali’s attorneys are demanding that Warfaa’s long-running lawsuit, originally brought in 2004 and much delayed since, is thrown out on the grounds that a recent US supreme court ruling in a separate case gives him immunity from prosecution.

  

Call me jaded, but I suspect he'll win. There's precedence.

The supreme court case upon which Ali is relying is the 2013 decision in Kiobel v Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum, in which the panel ruled that a group of Nigerian refugees living in the US had no claim against the British-Dutch multinational they accused of colluding with the Nigerian military to torture and murder environmental protestors in the 1990s. In a split decision, the justices ruled that the ATS did not apply to human rights abuses committed in other countries unless there was a strong connection to the US.

Not to mention, the presiding district court Judge Leonie Brinkema announced last July tht she would dismiss the suit against Ali, but agreed to hold off until an appeal was decided.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.