On September 26, 2013, the Appeals Chamber for the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Special Court) unanimously upheld the Trial Chamber’s conviction of Charles Ghankay Taylor, the former President of Liberia, and affirmed his fifty-year sentence for aiding and abetting rebel forces in Sierra Leone that perpetrated brutal crimes during the civil war in Sierra Leone. The Appeals Chamber’s judgment followed an almost four-year trial that included testimony from 115 witnesses, including Taylor himself—who testified in his defense for seven months—and celebrities such as British model Naomi Campbell and U.S. actress Mia Farrow, who the Prosecution called to show that Taylor knowingly handled blood diamonds. Taylor is the first head of state that an international or hybrid tribunal has convicted since the Nuremberg trials.

When does an agreement to arbitrate a commercial dispute constitute a waiver of sovereign immunity? This question has assumed increasing importance over the past decades in direct proportion to the extent that sovereign states and their agencies, entities, and instrumentalities have agreed to arbitrate their disputes with investors and under commercial contracts. On August 19, 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit considered this issue in the context of a petition to confirm an arbitral award, when it ruled that by becoming a party to the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID Convention), Argentina had waived its sovereign immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA).

The International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) (the Domestic Workers Convention or Convention), as supplemented by an accompanying non-binding Recommendation (No. 201), on June 16, 2011. Both instruments were immediately hailed as historic. Two years later, on September 5, 2013, the Domestic Workers Convention entered into force, thus bringing the fifty-three to 100 million predominantly women workers—many of whom are migrants—squarely within the corpus of international labor law, with due attention paid to the specificity of their human rights claims.