On June 12, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (the Court) vacated Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman Al Bahlul’s conviction for inchoate conspiracy to commit war crimes in Al Bahul v. United States.  The Court found that Congress lacked the authority to include conspiracy on the list of internationally-recognized war crimes that a military commission could try, holding “that Bahlul’s conviction for inchoate conspiracy by a law of war military commission violated the separation of powers enshrined in Article III § 1 and must be vacated.”  The Court further noted that the Supreme Court had previously looked only to the Define and Punish Clause to determine the scope of congressional authority to confer jurisdiction and stated that “Congress cannot, pursuant to the Define and Punish Clause, declare an offense to be an international war crime when the international law of war concededly does not.”  According to a news article, “[l]ast year, the appeals court had previously thrown out al-Bahlul’s convictions for providing material support for terrorism and soliciting others to commit war crimes. It initially rejected al-Bahlul’s challenge to his conspiracy conviction, but gave him another chance to attack it on constitutional grounds.”