On November 4, 2014, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) held in Tarakhel v. Switzerland, in a 14 to 3 decision, that Swiss authorities would violate Article 3 (prohibition of torture/inhuman and degrading treatment) of the European Convention on Human Rights (European Convention) if the applicants were to be expelled to Italy, in application of the Dublin Regulation, without Switzerland having first obtained assurances from the Italian authorities that “the applicants would be taken charge of in a manner adapted to the age of the children and that the family would be kept together.”

In Achmea B.V. v. Slovak Republic, an arbitration proceeding under the 1976 United Nations Commission on International Trade (UNCITRAL) Arbitration Rules, seated in Geneva, Switzerland, the Tribunal analyzed Achmea’s claims under the Netherlands-Slovak Republic Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) and the Slovak Republic’s objections that Achmea’s claim manifestly lacked legal merit due to the inexistence of a “dispute” within the scope of the BIT. The Tribunal found that while an arbitrable “dispute” did exist between the parties, the claimant had not established a prima facie violation of the BIT, leading the Tribunal to decline jurisdiction.

On October 22, 2014, the Italian Constitutional Court rendered a decision on the constitutional legitimacy of certain domestic norms that required Italy’s compliance with the rule on state immunity sanctioned by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) with the Judgment Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy: Greece Intervening). The Constitutional Court declared that the international customary obligations on state immunity from jurisdiction can be applied automatically within the Italian legal order only as long as they are in conformity with the fundamental rights contained in the Constitution.

On June 27, 2014, at the 23rd Ordinary Session of the Summit of the African Union held in Malobo, Equatorial Guinea, member states of the Africa Union adopted the Protocol on the Establishment of the African Monetary Fund (Fund).

Plan for the Fund is not new but dates back to the 1963 Charter of the Organization of African Unity (the predecessor to the Africa Union) as well as to the 1991 Abuja Treaty—the agreement that established the African Economic Community and put in place a framework for continental integration. The Constitutive Act of the African Union (Constitutive Act) adopted in 2000 also envisaged the establishment of the Fund. Annexed to the Protocol is the Statute of the African Monetary Fund (Statute). As envisioned in the Abuja Treaty, the Fund, together with continental institutions such as the Africa Investment Bank and the African Central Bank that are still in the pipeline, are critical to efforts to create a continental economic and monetary union in Africa.

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.