In a unanimous judgment in the case Hirsi Jamaa v. Italy, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (Court) held that Italy’s “push back” operations interdicting intending migrants and refugees at sea and returning them to Libya amounted to a violation of the prohibition of torture and other inhuman or degrading treatment under Article 3 of the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR or Convention), the prohibition of collective expulsions under Article 4 of Protocol 4 to the Convention, and the right to an effective remedy under Article 13 of the Convention. Hirsi Jamaa is the Court’s first judgment on the interception of migrants at sea and it addresses issues concerning the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 1979 International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue, as well as the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

In the joined cases brought by the European Commission (Commission), the United Kingdom, and the Council of the European Union (EU) against Yassin Abdullah Kadi, decided on July 18, 2013, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ or Court) sustained the judgment of the General Court that had annulled the Commission regulation freezing Kadi’s funds in accordance with the mandate of the United Nations Security Council’s sanctions committee. The ECJ ruled that, although the majority of the reasons relied on by EU authorities for listing Kadi were sufficiently detailed and specific to allow him to exercise his rights of defense and judicial review effectively, no information or evidence had been produced to substantiate the allegations, when challenged by Kadi, that he had been involved in activities linked to international terrorism.

On August 21, 2012, the Mexican Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Article 57 of the Mexican Code of Military Justice (CMJ) and in doing so complied with several judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (I/A Court). From the point of view of Mexican law, the Supreme Court’s decision means that civilians who have suffered from the unconstitutional expansion of military jurisdiction in Mexico are, for the first time, protected by the federal judiciary. More significant from the perspective of international law, the decision to bring Mexican law into compliance with the judgments of the I/A Court reflects growing acceptance of that Court’s judgments, and international human rights law, by the states parties to the American Convention on Human Rights (American Convention), as well as the general decline of military jurisdiction and impunity in the region.

On February 28, 2013, the appeals chamber (Chamber) of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) overturned the 2011 conviction of General Momčilo Perišsicć, the former head of the Yugoslav Army (VJ), for aiding and abetting war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. By a 4-1 vote, the Chamber held that “specific direction” is an essential element of liability for the actus reus of aiding and abetting the crimes of murder, extermination, inhumane acts, attacks on civilians, and persecution as crimes against humanity and/or violations of the laws or customs of war. It also held that Perišsicć lacked the necessary “effective control” over his subordinates to subject him to command responsibility for their violations of the laws and customs of war.

On June 11, 2013, in Stichting Mothers of Srebrenica, a chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found that the Dutch courts’ grant of immunity to the United Nations in a case brought by and on behalf of relatives of individuals killed by the Army of the Republika Srpska in and around Srebrenica in July 1995 did not run afoul of Articles 6 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights (Convention). Those provisions guarantee, respectively and among other things, the right of access to a court and the right to “an effective remedy before a national authority” if any Convention right is violated. Having found that the challenged decisions accorded with Dutch obligations under the Convention, the chamber declared the application before the Court inadmissible as “manifestly ill-founded” and “rejected” it pursuant to Article 35(3)(a) and 4. The chamber’s decision was unanimous.

On December 8, 2011, the Japanese Supreme Court decided that the accession to a multilateral treaty by a state not recognized by Japan cannot create obligations between Japan and that state except with respect to obligations of universal value under general international law. The case arose in the specific context of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Berne Convention) but has broader implications for the operation of multilateral treaties in general.

On April 26, 2012, Trial Chamber II (Chamber) of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Special Court or Court) in The Hague convicted former Liberian president Charles Ghankay Taylor of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from November 30, 1996, to January 18, 2002, in the territory of Sierra Leone during its civil war. Specifically, Taylor was found guilty of the crimes against humanity of murder, rape, sexual slavery, enslavement and other inhumane acts, and the war crimes of committing acts of terror, murder, outrages upon personal dignity, cruel treatment, pillage, and conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into armed forces or groups or using them to participate actively in hostilities. In a separate judgment rendered on May 30, 2012, the Chamber sentenced Taylor to a single term of fifty years for all the counts on which the accused had been convicted.

In February 2013, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD Committee or the Committee) issued its opinion in TBB—Turkish Union in Berlin/Brandenburg v. Germany. The majority of the Committee concluded that Germany had violated its obligations to protect its Turkish and Arab populations from a former state official’s allegedly racially discriminatory statements in violation of Articles 2(1)(d), 4(a), and 6 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD or the Convention). The Committee reached significant conclusions regarding the contours of incitement to racial hatred and ideas of racial superiority, the balance between freedom from discrimination and freedom of expression, and state discretion not to prosecute. Consideration of this matter also marks the first time a member of the CERD Committee has filed an individual—or dissenting—opinion.

In August 2012, the First Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation (Supreme Court or Court), the highest Italian domestic court, issued a judgment upholding Germany’s sovereign immunity from civil claims brought by Italian war crime victims against Paul Albers and eight others in the Italian courts (Albers). In so doing, the Court overruled its own earlier decisions and also reversed the judgment of April 20, 2011, by the Italian Military Court of Appeal (Military Court), which had upheld such claims relating to war crimes committed by German forces in Italy during World War II. With this ruling, the Court of Cassation put an end to its decade long effort to find an exception to the well-known rule of customary international law providing for sovereign immunity from foreign civil jurisdiction for acts jure imperii. This revirement resulted from the Court’s decision to give effect to the judgment of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Germany v. Italy.

In three cases decided on the same day, the French Court of Cassation held that the provisional attachments of funds belonging to the Republic of Argentina by NML Capital Ltd. (NML) were void on the ground of sovereign immunity from enforcement because the funds were intended to finance state noncommercial activities and had not been subject to an express waiver of immunity by Argentina. These cases are the first judicial application by the Court of Cassation of the 2004 United Nations Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States and Their Property (2004 UN Convention), which France signed on January 17, 2007, and ratified on June 28, 2011.

In the first criminal piracy decision by a United States court in nearly a century, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the federal piracy statute’s reference to the “law of nations” explicitly ties the scope of the offense to evolving customary international law definitions of the crime. The court went on to find that under current customary and treaty law, attempted piracy falls within the scope of the international crime. In doing so, it joined several courts in nations around the world that have confronted the issue as a result of the outbreak of Somali piracy that began in 2008.