On March 28, 2018, a U.S. District Judge Max O. Cogburn of the Western District of North Carolina sentenced Milan Trisic to 18 months in prison for his criminal conviction of obtaining a Permanent Resident Card (I-551), also known as a “green card,” by making materially false claims and statements on his initial application for refugee status.

On April 9, 2018, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC or the Court), Fatou Bensouda, filed her request with the President of the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC), Judge Antoine Kesia-Mbe Mindua, seeking  a ruling on a question of jurisdiction: whether the Court may exercise jurisdiction over the alleged deportation of the Rohingya people from Myanmar to Bangladesh.

On March 15, 2018, the European Court of Human Rights – Grand Chamber (Court) delivered a judgment in the case of Nait-Liman v. Switzerland (application no. 51357/07). It held, by a majority (fifteen votes to two), that there had been no violation of Article 6 § 1 (right of access to a court) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR or the Convention). The case concerned the refusal by the Swiss courts to examine Mr Naït-Liman’s civil claim for compensation for the non-pecuniary damage arising from acts of torture allegedly inflicted on him in Tunisia. 

 On March 29, 2018, the Czech Republic extradited Yevgeny Nikulin, an alleged Russian hacker,, who was arrested in Prague in cooperation with the FBI in 2016.

On March 27, 2018, the Angola Attorney General’s office accused Jose Filomeno dos Santos (known as Zenú), the son of Angola’s ex-president, of trying to defraud US $500 million from the country’s sovereign wealth fund (Fundo Soberano De Angola or FSDEA).  The Attorney General also charged Valter Filipe, the former governor of the National bank of Angola, with the fraud.

On April 4, 2018, the Washington College of Law (WCL) hosted a launch of Professor Diane Orentlicher’s new book, Some Kind of Justice: The ICTY’s Impact in Bosnia and Serbia (Oxford U. Press, 496  pages).   Susana SáCouto, director of the WCL Office of War Crimes Research made opening remarks and noted that Professor Diane Orentlicher founded the office.

On February 27, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Jennings et al. v. Rodriguez, a class-action suit brought on behalf of immigrants who had been detained indefinitely in the United States pending deportation proceedings. The Supreme Court held that certain statutory provisions of the federal immigration laws (namely, 8 U.S.C. Sections 1225(b), 1226(a) and 1226(c)) do not grant aliens the right to periodic bond hearings during the course of their detention.  In a 5-3 opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court reversed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit’s (“Ninth Circuit”) decision that both legal and illegal immigrants must be given a new bond hearing every six months while being detained.

On March 27, 2018, New York officials announced the indictment of a Mexico-based drug kingpin and five codefendants allegedly involved in a conspiracy to traffic and distribute large quantities of fentanyl to the New York City area. The indictment, filed by the City of New York’s office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor, charges Francisco Quiroz-Zamora aka “Gordo,” 41, with Operating as a Major Trafficker, as well as Conspiracy in the Second Degree and Criminal Sale of a Controlled Substance in the First Degree. The first is New York State’s top narcotics charge.

On March 23, 2018, an indictment against nine Iranian nationals was unsealed in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.  It charges them as serving as leaders, contractors, associates, hackers-for-hire, and affiliates of the Mabna Institute, an Iran-based company responsible for a coordinated campaign of cyber intrusions starting in at least 2013 into computer systems belonging to 144 U.S.-based universities, 176 universities across 21 foreign countries, 47 domestic  and private sector companies, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the State of Hawaii, the State of Indiana, the United Nations, and the U.N. Children’s Fund.  The Mabna Institute allegedly used the acts of the defendants to steal over 30 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property from universities, and email in boxes from employees of victim private sector companies, government victims, and non-governmental organizations.  The defendants made many of these intrusions on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (“IRGC”), one of several entities within the government of Iran responsible for gathering intelligence, as well as other Iranian government clients.  In addition to the criminal charges, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Mabna Institute and the nine defendants for sanctions for the malicious cyber-enabled activity discussed in the indictment.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced plans this week to do away with a requirement from a 2014 ruling by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals that demands that all asylum seekers be given a full hearing in front of an immigration judge. Once this rule is eliminated, immigration judges will have the power to deny asylum to those seeking it based only upon an initial review of their petition. While Sessions and others in the Justice Department claim that this will ease the backlog of cases currently in the court system that are preventing judges from providing relief to deserving candidates, there are others who have expressed concern at the possibility of endangering thousands of people by sending them back to their native countries without giving them adequate time to explain their situation.