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.

The resolution “Territorial Integrity of Ukraine: Defending the Principles of the Charter of the United Nations” was adopted by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on October 12, 2022, with 143 UN member states in favor, five against, thirty-five abstentions, and ten not voting. It is another important UNGA resolution on Ukraine, after the UNGA qualified as aggression Russia's invasion of Ukraine since February 24, 2022 in its resolution of 2 March 2022. That resolution had 141 states voting in favor, thus a slight increase in votes supporting Ukraine's rights under international law can be seen in the resolution at issue.

Domestic courts frequently apply foreign law. For example, the forum's choice-of-law rules may require a court to apply foreign law, or a party may expressly base a claim or defense on foreign law. Private international law (or “conflict of laws”) provides principles governing many aspects of the way courts should identify and interpret foreign law.

In 2012, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rendered its fourth judgment in Nicaragua v. Colombia. The case was first initiated by Nicaragua under the Bogotá Pact in 2001. The fourth judgment affirmed Colombia’s territorial sovereignty over a group of islands in the western Caribbean Sea and delimited a boundary between the two states’ zones of maritime jurisdiction. Even after eleven years of complicated proceedings, however, the parties’ conflicting claims are not yet completely resolved. The ICJ explicitly declined to address Nicaragua’s potential entitlement to the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from its coastal baselines, including the portion of Nicaragua’s ‘‘outer’’ continental shelf that allegedly overlaps with Colombia’s maritime entitlements. For the foreseeable future, this aspect of the controversy will likely remain unresolved. One week after the ICJ rendered its fourth judgment, Colombia withdrew from the Bogotá Pact and thereby terminated its consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction.

On April 14, 2018, Protocol 16 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms received sufficient ratifications and entered into force on August 1, 2018. The Protocol, for the first time, enabled the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to provide advisory opinions for the states that ratified the Protocol.

At its sixty-sixth session in 2014, the International Law Commission completed its final report on the obligation to extradite or prosecute and submitted it to the United Nations General Assembly for consideration at its sixty-ninth session.1 The report concluded the Commission’s work on a topic the General Assembly had long considered important in states’ efforts to cooperate in the prevention of impunity for crimes of international concern.2 The Commission addressed the implementation of the obligation; gaps in the existing conventional regime; the priority between the obligation to prosecute and the obligation to extradite, and the scope of the obligation to prosecute; the relationship between the obligation with erga omnes obligations or jus cogens norms; the customary international law status of the obligation; and other matters of relevance from the general framework created in 2009 for the Commission’s consideration of the topic.

On July 1, 2020, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2532 on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic across the world and its impact on international peace and security. After determining that “the unprecedented extent of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security,” the Council called upon all parties to armed conflicts to apply an “immediate cessation of hostilities” and to engage in “a durable humanitarian pause … in order to enable the safe, unhindered and sustainable delivery of humanitarian assistance, provisions of related services by impartial humanitarian actors … and medical evacuations.” The resolution marks the first time the Security Council has called for a global ceasefire in connection with an international health emergency.

The establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998 constitutes a landmark in the development of International Criminal Law (ICL), which gained its first momentum after World War II through the foundation of International Military Tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo. ICL is, however, not confined to these most prominent courts or their statutes providing for definitions of international crimes under their respective jurisdiction; rather, ad hoc international, or internationalized and hybrid special tribunals and criminal chambers also contribute to the development and shape of ICL and reflect its diverse legal and institutional basis. Perceived as another tribunal of “international character,” on August 18, 2020, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) pronounced its judgment on the merits in the Ayyash case. The long-awaited verdict raises the question of the Tribunal's contribution to the further evolution of ICL.