In 2014, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rendered judgment in a maritime boundary dispute between Peru and Chile (Judgment). The subject of the dispute was an area of maritime space in the Pacific Ocean comprising nearly seventy thousand square kilometers, or roughly “an area the size of Sri Lanka or Georgia.”

On May 27, 2014, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights rendered its judgment in the case of Marguš v. Croatia. The applicant, who had served in the Croatian Army, was convicted of war crimes in 2007, following an earlier decision in 1997 to grant him amnesty for these crimes. A majority of the Grand Chamber drew on Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights (the Convention) and general international law to argue that Article 4 of Protocol No. 7 of the Convention (the right not to be tried or punished twice) was inapplicable in these circumstances and that the applicant’s claim on this point was inadmissible. The Grand Chamber also ruled that there had been no violation of Article 6 of the Convention (the right to a fair trial).

On September 26, 2013, the Appeals Chamber for the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Special Court) unanimously upheld the Trial Chamber’s conviction of Charles Ghankay Taylor, the former President of Liberia, and affirmed his fifty-year sentence for aiding and abetting rebel forces in Sierra Leone that perpetrated brutal crimes during the civil war in Sierra Leone. The Appeals Chamber’s judgment followed an almost four-year trial that included testimony from 115 witnesses, including Taylor himself—who testified in his defense for seven months—and celebrities such as British model Naomi Campbell and U.S. actress Mia Farrow, who the Prosecution called to show that Taylor knowingly handled blood diamonds. Taylor is the first head of state that an international or hybrid tribunal has convicted since the Nuremberg trials.

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.

On July 1, 2014, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court or the Grand Chamber) delivered its judgment in the case of S.A.S. v. France pertaining to the legality of the French ban on wearing full-face veils in public, introduced by Law No. 2010-1192 of October 11, 2010. The decision comes on the heels of a number of related judgments in adjacent areas of dispute circumscribing the right to privacy and religion and delimiting the circumstances that may justify interference with such fundamental human rights. In the present case, the Court for the first time had to deal with a general ban on certain clothing that arguably, for those most affected, epitomizes the manifestation of their religion. Accepting the principle of “living together (le ‘vivre ensemble’)” as an inherent element of the “rights and freedoms of others” in the French context and conceding a wide margin of appreciation to the respondent state in preserving that principle, the Court found no violation of the applicant’s rights to respect for her private life (Article 8) and to freedom of religion (Article 9) under the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention).

In September 2013, officials of the Russian Federation boarded the vessel Arctic Sunrise, an icebreaker flying the flag of the Netherlands. The vessel, operated by Greenpeace International, was present in the Russian Federation’s Exclusive Economic Zone in order to protest against the operation of the offshore fixed oil platform Prirazlomnaya. Russian authorities detained the Arctic Sunrise itself and all persons on board the vessel, initially based on an accusation of piracy.

On July 3, 2014, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued its partial Judgment on the Merits in the case of Georgia v. Russian Federation (I). The ECHR Grand Chamber granted and denied various claims brought by Georgia. It determined that Georgia’s requested compensation relief was not yet ripe for decision.

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, in X and Others v. Austria, held by a majority of ten to seven that Austria violated Article 14 (prohibition on discrimination) taken in conjunction with Article 8 (right to respect for private and family life) of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (the Convention) when it denied an unmarried same-sex couple the right to a second-parent adoption when second-parent adoptions are available to unmarried opposite-sex couples. This is the first time the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) has recognized a right to second-parent adoption by same-sex couples.

When does an agreement to arbitrate a commercial dispute constitute a waiver of sovereign immunity? This question has assumed increasing importance over the past decades in direct proportion to the extent that sovereign states and their agencies, entities, and instrumentalities have agreed to arbitrate their disputes with investors and under commercial contracts. On August 19, 2013, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit considered this issue in the context of a petition to confirm an arbitral award, when it ruled that by becoming a party to the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States (ICSID Convention), Argentina had waived its sovereign immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA).

On December 12, 2012, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (Court) in the case of Prosecutor v. Laurent Koudou Gbagbo unanimously confirmed the Pre-Trial Chamber I decision to dismiss Mr. Gbagbo’s challenge to the jurisdiction of the Court. In the Judgment, the Appeals Chamber, for the first time, was called to interpret Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute (Statute), which allows a non-party State to accept the jurisdiction of the Court on an ad hoc basis without acceding to the Statute. The Judgment further includes two procedural issues. Firstly, the Appeals Chamber found that although the Pre-Trial Chamber erred by not rendering a separate decision on Côte d’Ivoire’s request for leave to submit its observations, this error did not materially affect the Pre-Trial Chamber’s decision. Secondly, the Appeals Chamber dismissed, in limine, Mr. Gbagbo’s request for a stay of proceedings based on allegations of violations of his fundamental rights, since it was not jurisdictional in nature and thus fell outside the scope of the appealable matter.

The dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) brought in its wake massive bloodshed, as well as human rights violations not seen on the European continent since the end of the Second World War. It probed the boundaries of contemporary international law in numerous ways, including providing the first “field tests” of the doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” which may turn out to be the biggest challenge to the notion of state sovereignty posed in centuries.

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 April 14, 2014, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (the Tribunal) rendered its Judgment in the case of the M/V Virginia G.. The judgment notably clarifies the scope of the sovereign rights of a coastal state with respect to living resources in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ).

The International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) (the Domestic Workers Convention or Convention), as supplemented by an accompanying non-binding Recommendation (No. 201), on June 16, 2011. Both instruments were immediately hailed as historic. Two years later, on September 5, 2013, the Domestic Workers Convention entered into force, thus bringing the fifty-three to 100 million predominantly women workers—many of whom are migrants—squarely within the corpus of international labor law, with due attention paid to the specificity of their human rights claims.

On December 12, 2013, the Fifth Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ or the Court) issued its decision in Frédéric Hay v. Crédit Agricole Mutuel de Charente-Maritime et des Deux-Sévres (the Hay decision), an important ruling on the rights of same-sex couples in the workplace. Certain provisions in a collective agreement allowed employees to claim particular benefits on the occasion of a marriage, but not on the occasion of the conclusion of a form of civil partnership. The Court found that, since at the relevant time homosexual couples were only permitted to enter into civil partnership and not marriage under French law, the impugned provisions constituted direct discrimination based on sexual orientation and were therefore prohibited by the 2000 Employment Equality Framework Directive (the Equality Directive).

How far can a country go in recruiting workers from neighboring countries to do the menial labor the country’s citizens are no longer willing to do and then–when they overstay their welcome, have children, and establish families over a period of decades—continue to deny them nationality and civil rights? Can these Gastarbeiter be turned into perpetual foreigners or must they be granted citizenship? How much has international human rights law impacted international law in restricting the freedom of sovereign states in this traditionally most discretionary domain? Are questions of nationality still within the exclusive domain of domestic jurisdiction?

In April and May of 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), sitting as a Grand Chamber, issued two preliminary rulings with dramatic implications for internet privacy—a topic of increasing global concern following Edward Snowden’s leaks on the data surveillance programs run by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its allies. The first case, Digital Rights Ireland Ltd. v. Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources and others joined with Kärtner Landesregierung and others, found an unacceptable interference in the rights to privacy and data protection in a European Union directive that required private telecom and internet companies to retain records of user activity and to make those records available for use by law enforcement. The second case, Google Spain SL, Google Inc. v. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos and Mario Costeja González, recognized that there are situations where an internet search engine, such as Google, could be ordered to erase links from search results to protect individual privacy. While these two cases have dramatically different policy implications, both demonstrate Europe’s efforts to apply human rights to modern technology and to reconcile security, freedom of information, and privacy.

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.

On March 27, 2014, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 68/262 on the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The resolution was adopted in response to the March 16, 2014 referendum held in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and city of Sevastopol, and it affirmed the territorial integrity, unity, sovereignty, and political independence of Ukraine, calling on states to desist and refrain from actions that undermine the unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine.