In May 2014, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, an expert body tasked with monitoring the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) by its state parties, issued its concluding observations on the second periodic report of the Holy See. The observations mark a definitive turning point in the approach of the treaty body concerning the nature of obligations which the Holy See incurs under the Convention; shed light on the concrete modalities which the Holy See could embrace to perform these obligations; and tie into the broader discussion on the extraterritorial reach of human rights treaties, in casu, the CRC.

On September 16, 2014, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) gave its judgment in the case of Hassan v. United Kingdom.This is the Court’s first explicit engagement with the co-applicability of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in relation to detention in international armed conflicts. The judgment is significant for its rejection of the government’s argument that international humanitarian law operates as lex specialis to displace international human rights law entirely during the “active hostilities phase of an international armed conflict.” It is also noteworthy for the majority’s ruling that provisions on detention of prisoners of war and the internment of protected persons in the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949 could be read into Article 5 (right to liberty and security) of the European Convention on Human Rights (the European Convention), creating a new ground for detention under Article 5(1) in international armed conflicts and modifying the procedural guarantees in Article 5(4).

On June 17, 2022, the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference issued a “Draft Ministerial Decision on the TRIPS Agreement,” addressing the requirements established in Articles 31 and 39.3 of the TRIPS Agreement in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Decision provides several clarifications regarding the process by which member countries may “authorize the use of the subject matter of a patent” without the consent of the right holder for the purposes of “production and supply of COVID-19 vaccines.” The decision provides guidance to countries considering the use of legal mechanisms, particularly compulsory licenses, to transfer vaccine technology with the goal of increasing the number of doses of COVID-19 vaccine available to underserved populations, especially in lower-income countries.