In 2013, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rendered judgment in a dispute between Cambodia and Thailand (the 2013 Judgment)1 over the interpretation of the ICJ’s previous decision in the Case Concerning the Temple of Preah Vihear (the 1962 Judgment).2 The parties’ dispute arises from longstanding uncertainty over the location of the territorial boundary between Cambodia and Thailand in the region of the Dangrek Mountains. Neither the original judgment nor its interpretation fully resolves this uncertainty, although together they confirm Cambodia’s sovereignty over the Temple of Preah Vihear and the high promontory on which it stands.

Does human rights law require countries to investigate serious crimes and bring those responsible to justice? And if so, how far must a country go to satisfy this requirement? This case concerns the murder of Norbert Zongo, an investigative journalist and director of the weekly Burkinabe magazine L'Indpéndenant, his younger brother Ernest Zongo, and two work companions. All four were killed in Burkina Faso on December 13, 1998, in suspicious circumstances. The case was brought by the families of Zongo and his colleagues (Individual Applicants) and the NGO Burkinabé Human and Peoples' Rights Movement (NGO Applicant, together the Applicants). The Applicants alleged that the murders of Zongo and his colleagues were not a random act of violence, but were instead related to their investigations into various political scandals, including those operating at the very highest levels of Burkinabe government. The Applicants claimed that Burkina Faso officials had not only failed to properly investigate the case, but also deliberately stymied the investigation, leading to a failure to bring those responsible for the deaths to justice. The judgment, rendered on March 28, 2014, is only the second judgment to be rendered on the merits by the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (the Court). The Court ruled unanimously that Burkina Faso had violated Article 1 and Article 7 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. By a majority of 5 to 4, the Court also found that Burkina Faso had violated Article 9(2) of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and Article 66(2)(c) of the Revised Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Treaty. Following the judgment on the merits, the Court rendered its reparations judgment, also included here. This is only the second reparations judgment rendered by the Court, and the first to award reparations to the victims.

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.

On November 16, 2012, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) reversed by majority the findings of a unanimous Trial Chamber in Prosecutor v. Gotovina et al. (Gotovina). In so doing, it acquitted two Croatian generals, Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač, on all counts of the indictment, including persecution and deportation as crimes against humanity, and four counts of violations of the laws or customs of war.

Over the years, Soviet and post-Soviet Russian legal practice has responded to foreign and international economic sanctions reactively. As a rule, Russia has not initiated economic sanctions as an assertive measure against other countries, will apply sanctions authorized by an international organization of which it is a member and for which sanctions it has voted, and retaliates almost reflexively against economic sanctions imposed by others specifically against Russia, seemingly with little regard for the self-imposed consequences of its actions. The Civil Code of the Russian Federation authorizes (Article 1194), as did its predecessor the 1964 Civil Code of the RSFSR, the introduction of retaliatory measures (retorsion) in response to similar measures against Russian citizens and juridical persons in other states.