In 1959, the Fifth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the Organization of American States (OAS) took place in Santiago, Chile. At that meeting, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was created by a political resolution rather than by a treaty, as in Europe. Closely related to the question of promoting human rights was the issue of promoting democracy. Article 3(d) of the OAS Charter proclaims that, “[T]he solidarity of the American States and the high aims which are sought through it require the political organization of those States on the basis of the effective exercise of representative democracy,” yet the Charter made no attempt to define democracy. In order to fill this gap, the 1959 Declaration of Santiago, also adopted at this meeting, attempted to identify “some of the principles and attributes of the democratic system in this hemisphere” and the one that interests us here is: “Perpetuation in power, or the exercise of power without a fixed term and with the manifest intent of perpetuation, is incompatible with the effective exercise of democracy.”

On October 31, 2021, the leaders of the Government of Antigua and Barbuda and the Government of Tuvalu signed the “Agreement for the Establishment of the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law” (the Agreement). As noted in the title itself, the Agreement creates a Commission of “small island states” tasked with promoting international law principles that hold states responsible for failing to protect the marine environment by contributing to climate change. Among the responsibilities outlined in the Agreement, the Commission would have the power to seek advisory opinions from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS, or the Tribunal) as part of its efforts to pursue its mandate.

On August 31, 2020, an arbitral tribunal sitting in the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) rendered its final award in Güriş Construction & Engineering, Inc. v. Syrian Arab Republic (Güriş). The tribunal held that the Respondent had breached its obligations under the Agreement Between the Republic of Turkey and the Syrian Arab Republic Concerning the Reciprocal Promotion and Protection of Investments (the Turkey–Syria BIT).

Since January 23, 2019, several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, have recognized the speaker of the Venezuela National Assembly, deputy Juan Guaidó, as interim president until free and fair presidential elections are called. That recognition was a consequence of the repudiation of the 2018 presidential election, in which the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, was fraudulently proclaimed president for the term that began on January 10, 2019. A few days later, on February 6, 2019, the Venezuelan National Assembly approved a special law, the Statute that Governs the Transition to Democracy to Restore the Enforcement of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (the Transition Statute). The primary purpose of the Transition Statute was to regulate the exercise of the presidency by the speaker of the National Assembly acting as interim president, based on Article 233 of the Venezuelan Constitution.

On August 6, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit issued its judgment in Scalin. The case involved descendants of Jewish people in France who were sent to concentration camps on trains operated by the defendant railroad company. The descendants sued the railroad for personal property stolen by the railroad workers an given to the Nazis, arguing that the expropriation exception in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) for cases applied and that therefore, the case could be heard by U.S. courts. The district court dismissed the complaint, holding that the plaintiff descendants should pursue their complaint within the French administrative claims framework set up specifically to compensate victims of the Nazi regime. The district court relied on precedent permitting U.S. courts to abstain in favor of compensation systems based in the state where the harm occurred. In the meantime, the DC District Court disagreed with that precedent, holding that abstention is never proper and the Seventh Circuit suspended the appeal while the Supreme Court considered the Philipp case. After that judgment, the plaintiffs in this case asked the Court to remand the case to the district court so that the district court could determine whether any of the plaintiffs' predecessors in interest were not French citizens at the time the property was taken. The Court opined that a remand of this nature would omit consideration of the essential question in this case: “what is the plaintiffs' claim in the first place?” The Court noted that this “is a triple-foreign suit: plaintiffs allege that nationals of a country other than the United States were injured by a foreign entity (SNCF) in a foreign nation (France).” Although one of the plaintiffs is a U.S. citizen, the case nonetheless involves a foreign claim.