Following the events of September 11, 2001, the CIA established “the High-Value Detainee Program,” also known as the Rendition Detention Interrogation Program. On December 14, 2014, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a heavily redacted 500-page Executive Summary of the Committee's “Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program.” The full Committee Study is more than 6,700 pages long and remains classified. The release of the Executive Summary, however, disclosed new facts and provided a significant amount of new information to the European Court of Human Rights—mostly based on CIA classified documents—about the CIA extraordinary rendition and secret detention operations; their foreign partners or cooperators; as well as the plight of certain detainees, including Abu-Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania is the European Court's first judgment to have taken advantage of the information provided in the Senate Committee's Executive Summary of its Study.

An ad hoc arbitral tribunal convened pursuant to Article 287 and Annex VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) delivered its award on compensation on July 10, 2017, in Arctic Sunrise (Netherlands/Russia). The award was unanimous on all holdings and included no separate opinions. The Tribunal awarded the Netherlands just under EUR 5.4 million under four separate heads of damages arising out of Russian violations of its obligations under UNCLOS that were established in the Tribunal's award of August 15, 2015.

On November 24, 2017, the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (Court) handed down its decision on the merits in the case of Ingabire Victoire Umuhoza v. Rwanda. The case further elucidates the Court's standards on the right to a fair trial and the right to freedom of expression, in particular the latitude that should be given to political speech.

On July 23, 2018, the International Court of Justice (ICJ or Court) issued its Order on Qatar's request for provisional measures in the Qatar v. United Arab Emirates (UAE) case in which Qatar claims the UAE is responsible for violating the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD or the Convention). The Court has previously ordered provisional measures under CERD in the context of the Ukraine v. Russia case and in the Georgia v. Russia proceedings. As is already apparent in the Order and the dissenting and separate opinions, the Qatar v. UAE case raises important issues pertaining to the interpretation of racial discrimination on the basis of “national origin” under Article 1(1) CERD as well as to the reading of the procedural conditions under Article 22 CERD.

On May 18, 2017, the International Court of Justice (ICJ or Court) granted provisional measures in the Jadhav Case brought by India against Pakistan. This unremarkable order is in line with the Court's ordinary approach to requests for interim relief in death penalty cases. The Court ordered Pakistan to stay the execution of Kulbhushan Jadhav, an Indian national, pending a final decision in the proceedings instituted by India. It reiterated that orders on provisional measures are binding on the parties to whom they are addressed.

On December 7, 2016, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) made an order indicating provisional measures in Immunities and Criminal Proceedings (Equatorial Guinea v. France), a case concerning the trial of Equatorial Guinea's second vice-president in charge of defense and security, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, for alleged money laundering in France. This ongoing case highlights the expansive jurisdictional reach of anti-money laundering laws but so far offers no guidance as to whether it may be limited by official immunities or the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states.

On December 12, 2017, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights adopted its judgments on the compensation awarded to the applicants in the two landmark cases of Chiragov and Others v. Armenia and Sargsyan v. Azerbaijan. The Court ruled on the just satisfaction for the pecuniary and nonpecuniary damages incurred by the applicants, following the adoption of the principal judgments of June 16, 2015, on the merits of the cases establishing violations of the rights of families displaced by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in early 1990s. In these cases, the Court has for the first time dealt with the states' responsibility for violations of rights of hundreds of thousands of individuals forced to flee their homes and leave their property as a result of escalations of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which remains unresolved. The Court reserved the issue of just satisfaction for a later stage due to the “exceptional nature” of the cases, i.e., their relation to continuous violations in the context of the unresolved conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding territories.

The United States stands alone in its refusal to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty ratified by every other member state of the United Nations, which currently has 196 states parties. Article 37(a) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states: “Neither capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences committed by persons below eighteen years of age.”

On June 8, 2018, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) delivered its eagerly anticipated judgment on the appeal of Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo against his conviction by Trial Chamber III in March 2016 for war crimes (murder, rape, and pillage) and crimes against humanity (murder and rape). Bemba's conviction was notable for the variety of “firsts” it gave rise to for the ICC. As a former vice-president of the transitional government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and president of the Mouvement de libération du Congo (MLC), he became the most senior leader to be successfully convicted by the ICC. His conviction was the first in which an individual was found responsible for the commission of crimes pursuant to command responsibility under Article 28 of the Rome Statute. Of particular significance was the fact that this was the first conviction at the ICC for acts of rape and sexual violence committed against women and men. Finally, this was the first case in the history of international criminal law where members of the defense team were arrested, tried, and convicted of crimes against the administration of justice during the course of the trial. The trial judgment was heralded as “a turning point in the ICC's history” following the debacles in the Lubanga, Katanga, Chui, and Kenya cases. However, we now have a new addition to the list of firsts: with the Appeals Chamber's majority judgment (decided 3-2), Bemba becomes the first accused to have his conviction overturned in full.

On April 24, 2018, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its judgment in MP v. Secretary of State for the Home Department. The judgment considers the interpretation and application of the concept of subsidiary protection. In the EU, two forms of international protection exist: refugee status and subsidiary protection status. The latter may apply to those who are refused refugee status. For subsidiary protection to be granted, it is assessed whether there is a real risk that the individual in question will, upon return, be subjected to serious harm in the form of the death penalty, torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment, or to indiscriminate violence as a result of an armed conflict.

On March 20, 2018, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered a trio of judgments that substantially clarify the application of the ne bis in idem principle where both criminal and administrative proceedings are pursued. Both the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (the Charter) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) recognize the principle, but it will be more familiar to common law practitioners as the protection against double jeopardy. Increasingly, dual investigations are common in cases where the underlying activity is essentially financial crime, but tender areas continue to be information sharing and the risk of duplicate punishment where both investigations end in enforcement action. Concerning four cases, Case C-524/15 Menci, Case C-537/16 Garlsson Real Estate and Others, and joined Cases C-596/16 Di Puma and C-597/16 Zecca, each of the judgments addresses preliminary questions referred by the Italian courts; they are significant because they emphasize that ne bis in idem will not serve as a bar to a dual response. The interest in protecting the financial markets justifies limits to the principle but great care must be taken to coordinate the approaches and identify whether a further criminal sanction is masquerading as an administrative penalty.

On February 21, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the Seventh Circuit's decision in the case of Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran, concluding that 28 U.S.C. §1610(g) does not provide a freestanding basis for parties holding a §1605A judgment to attach and execute against the property of a foreign state. Instead, §1610(g) may be used to identify property that would be available for attachment and execution to satisfy a §1605A judgment, but a separate provision within §1610 must first apply to overcome execution immunity.

On September 21, 2017, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2379 mandating the establishment of an Investigative Team to collect and preserve evidence for use in national courts of international crimes carried out by the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Resolution 2379 marks a growing trend in the United Nations’ establishment of investigative mechanisms to support the domestic prosecution of international crimes, in lieu of referrals to the International Criminal Court or creation of ad hoc international or hybrid tribunals.

On September 5, 2017, a decision of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Bărbulescu v. Romania (Bărbulescu) helped define the boundaries regarding employee privacy in the European workplace. The Bărbulescu decision held that a Romanian employee's legally protected right to privacy was violated when his employer monitored personal messages he sent from a company account, reversing a previous decision by the ECHR in this case that had expanded employers' rights to monitor employees.

On June 27, 2017, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (GC) delivered its judgment in Satakunnan Markkinapörssi Oy and Satamedia Oy v. Finland. It was the first time that the GC considered whether the application of data protection law to the publishing activities of a media outlet had violated the right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights (Convention). In its judgment, the GC found that a prohibition on two companies publishing the taxation data of 1.2 million identifiable individuals had not violated the right to freedom of expression.

On January 31, 2017, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union rendered its judgment in the case Commissaire général aux réfugiés et aux apatrides v. Mostafa Lounani. In the judgment, the Court had to interpret the exclusion grounds of the EU Qualification Directive of 2004 that in its Article 12(2) has literally duplicated Article 1F of the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. It had to answer the question of whether an applicant for international protection can be excluded from being a refugee even though it is not established that he himself committed, attempted to commit, or threatened to commit a terrorist act as defined by the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, but has “just” been convicted of participation in the activities of a terrorist group.

On October 18, 2017, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom delivered an important judgment on diplomatic immunity. It was the first time the Supreme Court had considered the implications of human trafficking for the scope of diplomatic immunity. As Lord Sumption noted, “[s]ince there is some evidence that human trafficking under cover of diplomatic status is a recurrent problem, this is a question of some general importance.”

In the joint cases of Tele2 Sverige AB v. Post-och telestyrelsen and Secretary of State for the Home Department v. Tom Watson, Peter Brice, and Geoffrey Lewis (the Decision), the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) held that member states are precluded from adopting legislation that allows a general and indiscriminate retention of all traffic and location data. While targeted retention of data is allowed for the specific objective of fighting serious crime, retention must be proportionate and access to the data must be limited to what is strictly necessary. To ensure that this is achieved, adequate safeguards must be set in place and access to the data must be subject to prior review by a court or independent administrative body.