On October 11, 2013, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court (Court) rendered the “Decision on the admissibility of the case against Abdullah Al-Senussi” in the case of Prosecutor v. Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi and Abdullah Al-Senussi. In this important decision, the Pre-Trial Chamber, for the first time in the history of the Court, found a case inadmissible and decided that Libya may proceed with domestic proceedings against Mr. Al-Senussi.

The judgment in Bundesrepublik Deutschland v. Kaveh Puid concerns the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) and, in particular, the “Dublin Rules,” the intra-European arrangement that governs which State shall be responsible for determining a claim to asylum. This process began under the 1990 Dublin Convention, which was replaced by European Union (EU) Regulation 343/2003, commonly referred to as “Dublin II” (Dublin Regulation).

On December 4, 2013, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled in In the Matter of KL that a child brought to the UK pursuant to a U.S. district court order–subsequently overturned by a U.S. court of appeals–in a proceeding under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (Hague Convention) must be returned to the United States. One week earlier, in a 9-8 decision issued on November 26, 2013, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), upholding the judgment of the ECHR Chamber below, ruled in X v. Latvia that the actions of the Latvian courts, ordering Ms. X to return her daughter E. to Australia under the Hague Convention, constituted an infringement of Ms. X’s rights under Article 8 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (Human Rights Convention). These cases provide an interesting contrast in approaches to the international abduction of children.

On September 5, 2013, the Code of Conduct for the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP Code) adopted by the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) at the International Criminal Court (Court or ICC) entered into force, a little over a year after the commencement of the term of the current Prosecutor, Mrs. Fatou Bensouda. Though the Code fills an important void in the regulation of OTP ethical conduct, its provenance and content mean that much will depend on the manner in which it is applied in the future.

The right to a nationality is well established in international human rights law. In 1954 and 1961, the United Nations adopted the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, respectively. Inspired by Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the two Conventions provide for a right to nationality and prohibit deprivation or denial of nationality. In 2012, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) drafted four guidelines on statelessness that expand on provisions of the 1954 and 1961 UN Conventions. They contain guidance sections directed specifically at governments, civil society organizations, legal practitioners, decision-makers and the judiciary as well as UNHCR and other UN agency staff involved in addressing statelessness.