In 2012, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rendered its fourth judgment in Nicaragua v. Colombia. The case was first initiated by Nicaragua under the Bogotá Pact in 2001. The fourth judgment affirmed Colombia’s territorial sovereignty over a group of islands in the western Caribbean Sea and delimited a boundary between the two states’ zones of maritime jurisdiction. Even after eleven years of complicated proceedings, however, the parties’ conflicting claims are not yet completely resolved. The ICJ explicitly declined to address Nicaragua’s potential entitlement to the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from its coastal baselines, including the portion of Nicaragua’s ‘‘outer’’ continental shelf that allegedly overlaps with Colombia’s maritime entitlements. For the foreseeable future, this aspect of the controversy will likely remain unresolved. One week after the ICJ rendered its fourth judgment, Colombia withdrew from the Bogotá Pact and thereby terminated its consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction.

On March 28, 2019, the First Instance Division of the East African Court of Justice (the EACJ or Court) issued a judgment in Media Council of Tanzania and Others v. Attorney General of the United Republic of Tanzania, Reference No. 2 of 2017. The Court held that several provisions of United Republic of Tanzania's Media Services Act 2016 (the Act) violated the freedom of expression at the heart of the fundamental and operational principles enshrined in Articles 6(d) and 7(2) of the Treaty Establishing the East African Community (the EAC Treaty).

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.

The United Nations (UN) Security Council, for the first time in its history, declared a disease outbreak as “a threat to international peace and security” on September 18, 2014. An outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, the most harmful outbreak of this disease ever recorded, gave it cause to do so. The Ebola outbreak also marked the first time that the UN Secretary-General deployed, under his authority, a “United Nations emergency health mission”—neither a peacekeeping operation, nor a “political mission.” Finally, the Ebola outbreak motivated the World Health Organization (WHO) to make use of its authority to declare a “public health emergency of international concern” under the International Health Regulations (IHR) for the third time since their entry into force and induced the WHO Director-General to convene, for the third time in WHO’s history, a special session of the WHO Executive Board to reform WHO’s role in disease outbreak response. The materials presented below form essential background to these important developments in international health law and in the institutional practice of the United Nations system.