In its Chagos Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) addressed two questions posed in a request from the UN General Assembly. First, had Mauritius's decolonization been completed when it gained independence in 1968, after the excision of the Chagos Archipelago? Second, what were the legal consequences flowing from the United Kingdom's continued administration of the Archipelago? It was thought that the Court might shy away from giving an Opinion in this case as, arguably, it concerned a bilateral sovereignty dispute that the United Kingdom had not agreed to have resolved by judicial decision. However, as it turned out, the Court delivered surprisingly robust responses to the questions posed. The Opinion—and the numerous Separate Opinions that accompanied it—offer a thorough re-evaluation of the customary international law (CIL) concerning the right to self-determination in cases of decolonization.

The case of Anudo v. Tanzania is the first decided by the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights that considers the right to a nationality. The judgment complements existing jurisprudence from the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights and the African Committee of Experts on the Rights and Welfare of the Child. The Court ruled that Tanzania had arbitrarily deprived the applicant of his nationality and then arbitrarily expelled him from the country.

In E.S. v. Austria, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that a criminal conviction for making disparaging comments about the Prophet Muhammad, intimating in particular that he was a pedophile, did not violate the speaker's right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

On February 27, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion in Jam v. International Finance Corp., a case of critical importance for international organizations. The question presented in Jam was whether U.S. law affords international organizations absolute immunity from suit in the United States, or whether international organizations instead are entitled to only the more limited or “restrictive” immunity that applies to foreign sovereigns under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

On March 20, 2019, the Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals set aside Radovan Karadžić's prior sentence of forty years and imposed a life sentence. Karadžić was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws or customs of war in March 2016 by a Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and sentenced to forty years in prison. His crimes relate to war crimes he committed during the 1990s conflicts in the Balkans, in particular the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Serbs and the three-year long siege of Sarajevo. The Appeals Chamber reversed part of Karadžić's convictions related to the Overarching JCE and dismissed the rest of his appeal, while also dismissing most of the Prosecution's appeal, aside from the sentence. The Appeals Chamber judges found that the Trial Chamber “committed a discernible error and abused its discretion in imposing a sentence of only 40 years of imprisonment,” and consequently imposed a life sentence.