On November 24, 2017, the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (Court) handed down its decision on the merits in the case of Ingabire Victoire Umuhoza v. Rwanda. The case further elucidates the Court's standards on the right to a fair trial and the right to freedom of expression, in particular the latitude that should be given to political speech.

On December 12, 2017, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights adopted its judgments on the compensation awarded to the applicants in the two landmark cases of Chiragov and Others v. Armenia and Sargsyan v. Azerbaijan. The Court ruled on the just satisfaction for the pecuniary and nonpecuniary damages incurred by the applicants, following the adoption of the principal judgments of June 16, 2015, on the merits of the cases establishing violations of the rights of families displaced by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in early 1990s. In these cases, the Court has for the first time dealt with the states' responsibility for violations of rights of hundreds of thousands of individuals forced to flee their homes and leave their property as a result of escalations of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which remains unresolved. The Court reserved the issue of just satisfaction for a later stage due to the “exceptional nature” of the cases, i.e., their relation to continuous violations in the context of the unresolved conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding territories.

On June 27, 2017, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (GC) delivered its judgment in Satakunnan Markkinapörssi Oy and Satamedia Oy v. Finland. It was the first time that the GC considered whether the application of data protection law to the publishing activities of a media outlet had violated the right to freedom of expression under the European Convention on Human Rights (Convention). In its judgment, the GC found that a prohibition on two companies publishing the taxation data of 1.2 million identifiable individuals had not violated the right to freedom of expression.

The 2000–2005 al Aqsa Intifada spawned a horrific wave of violence in and near Jerusalem. Numerous individuals and entities were sued in U.S. courts, by both foreign and American victims, relying on a variety of liability theories and statutes. The seminal Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) case was filed in 2007 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York as Sokolow v. Palestine Liberation Organization. It also named the Palestinian Authority (PA) and individuals including Yasser Arafat.

On December 14, 2017, the International Criminal Court's (ICC) Assembly of States Parties (ASP or Assembly) adopted a resolution activating the ICC's jurisdiction over the crime of aggression as of July 17, 2018. As a result, the leaders of states now face the possibility of being held individually criminally responsible for unlawful acts of inter-state armed force. The resolution has thus rightly been hailed as historic—notwithstanding the significant limitation on the Court's jurisdiction accepted as the price of activation.