Following the events of September 11, 2001, the CIA established “the High-Value Detainee Program,” also known as the Rendition Detention Interrogation Program. On December 14, 2014, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a heavily redacted 500-page Executive Summary of the Committee's “Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program.” The full Committee Study is more than 6,700 pages long and remains classified. The release of the Executive Summary, however, disclosed new facts and provided a significant amount of new information to the European Court of Human Rights—mostly based on CIA classified documents—about the CIA extraordinary rendition and secret detention operations; their foreign partners or cooperators; as well as the plight of certain detainees, including Abu-Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah v. Lithuania is the European Court's first judgment to have taken advantage of the information provided in the Senate Committee's Executive Summary of its Study.

On April 24, 2018, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its judgment in MP v. Secretary of State for the Home Department. The judgment considers the interpretation and application of the concept of subsidiary protection. In the EU, two forms of international protection exist: refugee status and subsidiary protection status. The latter may apply to those who are refused refugee status. For subsidiary protection to be granted, it is assessed whether there is a real risk that the individual in question will, upon return, be subjected to serious harm in the form of the death penalty, torture, or inhuman or degrading treatment, or to indiscriminate violence as a result of an armed conflict.

On September 21, 2017, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2379 mandating the establishment of an Investigative Team to collect and preserve evidence for use in national courts of international crimes carried out by the terrorist group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Resolution 2379 marks a growing trend in the United Nations’ establishment of investigative mechanisms to support the domestic prosecution of international crimes, in lieu of referrals to the International Criminal Court or creation of ad hoc international or hybrid tribunals.