An ad hoc arbitral tribunal convened pursuant to Article 287 and Annex VII of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) delivered its award on compensation on July 10, 2017, in Arctic Sunrise (Netherlands/Russia). The award was unanimous on all holdings and included no separate opinions. The Tribunal awarded the Netherlands just under EUR 5.4 million under four separate heads of damages arising out of Russian violations of its obligations under UNCLOS that were established in the Tribunal's award of August 15, 2015.

On March 20, 2018, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered a trio of judgments that substantially clarify the application of the ne bis in idem principle where both criminal and administrative proceedings are pursued. Both the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (the Charter) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) recognize the principle, but it will be more familiar to common law practitioners as the protection against double jeopardy. Increasingly, dual investigations are common in cases where the underlying activity is essentially financial crime, but tender areas continue to be information sharing and the risk of duplicate punishment where both investigations end in enforcement action. Concerning four cases, Case C-524/15 Menci, Case C-537/16 Garlsson Real Estate and Others, and joined Cases C-596/16 Di Puma and C-597/16 Zecca, each of the judgments addresses preliminary questions referred by the Italian courts; they are significant because they emphasize that ne bis in idem will not serve as a bar to a dual response. The interest in protecting the financial markets justifies limits to the principle but great care must be taken to coordinate the approaches and identify whether a further criminal sanction is masquerading as an administrative penalty.

On February 21, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the Seventh Circuit's decision in the case of Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran, concluding that 28 U.S.C. §1610(g) does not provide a freestanding basis for parties holding a §1605A judgment to attach and execute against the property of a foreign state. Instead, §1610(g) may be used to identify property that would be available for attachment and execution to satisfy a §1605A judgment, but a separate provision within §1610 must first apply to overcome execution immunity.

On April 24, 2018, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its opinion in Jesner v. Arab Bank. In only the third case in which the Supreme Court has considered the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) since its enactment in 1789, the Court held that foreign corporations may not be defendants in suits brought under the ATS. In foreclosing foreign corporate liability under the ATS, the Court limited the pool of possible ATS claims that can be brought. However, it left open the question of whether U.S. corporations could be sued under the ATS.

On February 8, 2018, the U.K. Supreme Court delivered its judgment in R (Bancoult No 3) v. Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. The case concerned a challenge to the validity of a Marine Protected Area (MPA) extending 250,000 square miles around the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT or Chagos Archipelago). Declared in 2010, the MPA was justified on the ground of environmental protection and resulted in a ban on all commercial fishing in this zone. The appellant alleged that the MPA had been established for an improper purpose—to prevent the Chagos Islanders from resettling the Archipelago. He claimed that this was evidenced by a diplomatic cable sent from the U.S. embassy in London. It recorded a 2009 meeting in which U.S. and British officials discussed the reasons behind the MPA. The cable was subsequently leaked via the WikiLeaks website and published in two national newspapers. Accordingly, as Lady Hale rightly observed, “[t]he crucial legal issue in this case is therefore the admissibility of the cable.”