On December 21, 2016, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) dismissed an action brought by the Front Polisario challenging a decision of the Council of the European Union (EU) approving the conclusion of an agreement between the European Union and the Kingdom Morocco on the reciprocal liberalization of certain agricultural products. The CJEU held, based on the relevant rules of international law applicable between the EU and Morocco, that the agreement did not apply to the territory of Western Sahara. Apart from its obvious political overtones, the judgment is significant in further developing the CJEU's approach to the law of treaties and the principle of self-determination in international law.

On August 29, 2016, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (Tribunal) sentenced a corporate media enterprise and one of its employees for contemptuously interfering with the Tribunal's proceedings in Ayyash, a prosecution concerning the February 2005 terrorist attack that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. The contempt decision is significant for two reasons: (1) it adopts an expansive definition of the crime of contempt to restrict a journalist's freedom of expression; and (2) it is the first international judicial decision to hold a corporate entity criminally responsible.

In November 2016, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) at the International Criminal Court (ICC) produced an extensive report documenting the status of ten “preliminary examinations” it is conducting. These examinations cover situations in which crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court may have been committed but the prosecutor has not yet decided to open a full investigation. The OTP's reporting practice has shed additional light on a process that has been opaque for much of the Court's existence and that has attracted relatively limited scholarly and specialist attention.

On August 24, 2017, the Supreme Court of India issued a rare, unanimous nine-judge decision holding that the right to privacy is protected by the Constitution of India. The case is all the more noteworthy because the Court reversed its prior decisions holding that the right to privacy was not protected by the country's Constitution. It arose out of the government's creation of a national database of biometric and demographic information for every Indian. Rejecting the government's arguments, the Court found that the right to privacy applies across the gamut of “fundamental” rights including equality, dignity (Article 14), speech, expression (Article 19), life, and liberty (Article 21). The six separate and concurring judgments in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Ret'd) and Anr v. Union of India and Ors are trailblazing for their commitment to privacy as a fundamental freedom and for the judges’ use of foreign law across jurisdictions and spanning centuries.

On June 3, 2016, the African Court on Human and People's Rights (the Court) rendered its first default judgment, in a case brought by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (the Commission) against Libya for alleged violations of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (the Charter). The Commission had alleged that the Libyan government had violated its obligations under the Charter to protect one of its citizens, Saif al-Islam Kadhafi, from incommunicado detention and to provide him access to counsel. When Libya failed to respond to the Commission's complaint and to the Court's order of provisional measures, the Court proceeded to the merits and found Libya in violation of several articles of the Charter. Its decision reflected both a measured approach to the issuance of default judgments and an emphasis on the need for states to comply with their human rights obligations even in situations of exceptional political and security instability.

In a proceeding that challenged the domestic content requirements (DCRs) of India's solar energy program, the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO) upheld the panel determination that the Indian government's measures violated its international obligations. The decision offers new insights into certain exceptions for environmental policies under the multilateral trading system and elaborates on the relevance of other international legal regimes to the compliance issue under WTO law. Further, it has the potential to increase export opportunities of many countries in the Indian renewable energy market.

On December 8, 2016, an International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) tribunal (the Tribunal) held that international human rights condition the treatment that an investor is entitled to receive from a state and that human rights impose obligations on the investor itself. The Tribunal's explicit recognition of these dual consequences of international human rights law breaks new ground. International investment tribunals have not previously held that human rights obligations have any effect on protections due to investors, much less that international human rights law might establish separate obligations for investors.

On November 25, 2015, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Court) held that the state of Suriname had violated the rights of two indigenous groups by denying recognition of their juridical personality and their entitlement to collective property and judicial protection. In Kaliña and Lokono Peoples v. Suriname, the Court also considered the impact of nature reserves on indigenous land rights, as well as the legitimacy of private titling of property that encroaches on land for which collective title has not been attained. The decision pushes the Court's previous jurisprudence significantly—and somewhat controversially—by asserting that under the American Convention on Human Rights, indigenous peoples are entitled, as collective entities, to recognition of their legal personality. In so doing, the Court challenged ordinary assumptions about the individualized character of most adjudication regarding international human rights and made the possibility of enforcing collective rights more palpable.

On February 26, 2016, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Court) issued an advisory opinion requested by the Republic of Panama (Advisory Opinion). The request stemmed from “doubts among States” as to whether “legal persons, being legal fictions, are not as such entitled to rights” (Request) (para. 2). The Court unanimously held that legal persons are not entitled to rights under the American Convention on Human Rights (Convention) because Article 1.2 of the Convention establishes rights only in favor of natural persons. The Court, also unanimously, reiterated that indigenous and tribal communities are entitled to rights under the Convention. By majority vote, the Court held that labor union organizations are entitled to rights under the Protocol of San Salvador (Protocol). The Advisory Opinion is most significant for its finding regarding labor union organizations and for its analysis of how general international law relates to various aspects of the Inter-American system.

Shortly after President Trump was elected in November 2016, Australia and the United States finalized a bilateral agreement pursuant to which the United States committed to accepting refugees from Australian-backed immigration detention camps located in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. While Trump criticized the deal after his inauguration, his administration has nevertheless taken steps to implement it.

On September 28, 2016, Congress enacted the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), overriding a presidential veto for the first and only time during Obama's presidency. The Act allows Americans to sue foreign states for playing a role in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. While JASTA was written in general terms, it was drafted specifically to allow families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for its suspected role in those attacks. The Act received widespread bipartisan support despite the administration's consistent stance that the Act would harm U.S. economic, diplomatic, and national security interests.

On July 6, 2017, Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court (the Court or ICC)—composed of Judges Tarfusser, Perrin de Brichambaut, and Chung—held that South Africa violated the Rome Statute of the ICC (Rome Statute) by failing to arrest and surrender to the Court President Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan when he visited the country in June 2015. However, the Court did not refer the matter to the ICC Assembly of States Parties (ASP) or the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) pursuant to Article 87(7) of the Rome Statute. The decision added South Africa to a list of ICC state parties that have failed in their Rome Statute obligations with respect to the incumbent head of state of Sudan. It also marked the first time that the ICC Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), all ICC states parties, and the United Nations (UN) were invited to present their views and argue fully what is perhaps the most legally contentious and politically sensitive issue that the ICC has faced in its history.

In this trio of decisions, the International Court of Justice (ICJ or Court) rejected applications in which a small island state claimed that three larger states known to possess nuclear weapons had breached their international obligations to undertake and conclude negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament. The Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Court acknowledged, had been the location of repeated nuclear weapons testing from 1946 to 1958, when the United States administered the archipelagic nation under the trusteeship system of the United Nations. The Court further recognized that the applicant, “by virtue of the suffering which its people endured as a result of it being used as a site for extensive nuclear testing programs, has special reasons for concern about nuclear disarmament” (para. 44). Nevertheless, it ruled that the cases could not go forward because the requisite legal dispute was absent at the time that the Marshall Islands filed its applications against India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom.

On August 18, 2016, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Colombia (Constitutional Court or Court) rendered a significant decision in the Garcia de Borissow and Others case on issues of immunity from execution, diplomatic protection, and objections to customary international law in its review of two combined cases brought by former local employees against the embassies of the Lebanese Republic and the United States of America in Bogotá. While upholding the diplomatic missions’ immunity from execution of lower court judgments awarding monetary sums, the Constitutional Court instructed the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Foreign Ministry) to pursue recovery of such amounts either by diplomatic means or through enforcement of those judgments in Lebanese and American courts. The decision is both unique and problematic as a matter of international and domestic law.

In July 2017, Congress passed the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. The legislation—which enjoyed nearly unanimous legislative support—contained sanctions targeting Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Title II of the Act—titled separately as the Countering Russian Influence in Europe and Eurasia Act of 2017 (Countering Russian Influence Act)—entrenched and extended U.S. sanctions against Russia for violating Ukraine's territorial sovereignty and interfering with the U.S. presidential election. Title II's key provisions codified existing sanctions against Russia; imposed new sanctions against Russia; and restricted the president's authority to modify or eliminate these sanctions without congressional approval. Despite voicing constitutional objections to the legislation, President Trump signed the bill into law.

Throughout Donald Trump's presidential campaign and into the first months of his presidency, he has warned that the United States' commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) may depend on whether its partner states increase their defense spending in line with previously adopted guidelines. While senior administration officials have reaffirmed U.S. commitments to the NATO alliance, including the North Atlantic Treaty's mutual defense obligation on several occasions, President Trump himself did not so until mid-June. Separately, the Trump administration signaled its support for NATO by supporting the admission of Montenegro as a new member state.

On October 9, 2013, a group of Haitian cholera victims and their survivors sued the United Nations, along with two UN officials and the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs alleged that the United Nations had negligently and recklessly allowed peacekeepers from Nepal carrying cholera to enter Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake without reasonable health screenings. The suit further alleged that the United Nations had negligently maintained inadequate sanitation facilities. Finally, the petitioners alleged that the United Nations’ refusal to accept responsibility for the outbreak had exacerbated the epidemic. According to the United Nations, by August 2016, nearly 800,000 people had become infected with cholera, and more than 9,000 had died of cholera.