France’s National Assembly and the Senate unanimously adopted an amended version of a landmark bill on April 13, 2026, to facilitate the return of cultural property looted during the colonial era, in a move that signals a major shift in the field of international restitution law.   The legislation, law n° 2026-351, fulfills the promise Emmanuel Macron made during his speech at the University of Ouagadougou in 2017, to make the return of African heritage a priority.  The 2026 law is a direct response to the Macron ordered 2018 Savoy Sarr Report, which found that an estimated 90 to 95 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is currently held in major museums outside the continent, with France alone holding at least 90,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa

               In late April 2026, American authorities arrested infamous Guatemalan drug lord and member of the Los Huistas gang, Eugenio Dario Molina-Lopez.  In 2019,a grand jury indicted Molina-Lopez for Los Huistas’ role in a transnational cocaine trafficking scheme, where Molina-Lopez and his Guatemalan counterparts smuggled large quantities of cocaine into Mexico and then worked with Mexican criminal organizations to sneak that contraband into the USA. 

               On May 14, 2026, the United States (U.S.) Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that Colombia has extradited a 24-year-old Venezuelan national to answer an indictment in federal court in Houston for giving material support to a foreign terrorist organization and drug trafficking offenses.  On March 31, 2025, Colombian authorities arrested Jose Enrique Martinez Flores, also known as “Chuqui” pursuant to a SOJ provisional arrest warrant. 

               On May 15, 2026, the Council of Europe (CoE) officially adopted the Additional Protocol to the Council of Europe Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime and on the Financing of Terrorism (CETS No. 198) (commonly called Criminal Asset Recovery Convention). This was done through the decision adopted by the Committee of Ministers at the 135^th Session held in Chişinău (Moldova).

               On March 25, 2026, in a case of first impression United States prosecutors charged an Arizona gun dealer with charges related to furnishing material support to Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) and Cartel de Sinaloa (CDS),  Mexican cartels that the U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated as foreign terrorist organizations on February 25, 2025.  The indictment is against the owner of Grips by Larry.

 On April 29, 2026, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment against ten Mexican incumbent and former Mexican officials of the State of Sinaloa, the cradle of the Sinaloa Cartel (CdS), some 500 miles from the Mexico-United States (U.S.) border. The indictment charges the sitting governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha Moya, and nine other current and former Mexican officials with conspiring with CdS to traffic drugs, including fentanyl, into the United States, in exchange of millionaire bribes and support for their political activities.

Italian and American officials recently marked over twenty-five years of collaboration in the fight against the illicit trade of cultural property by returning almost 340 artifacts to Italy. The returned items ranged from Roman sculptures to medieval manuscripts and had all been recovered through joint Italy and U.S. investigations, with Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice playing crucial roles.

 On April 28, 2026, law enforcement conducted house searches in several Swiss cantons, resulting in ten arrests, including the Black Axe “regional Head” for the Southern European region. The law enforcement operation targeted leaders and members of the Black Axe, the Nigerian organization suspected of engaging in a variety of criminal activities. 

On April 14, 2026, Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt of the Southern District of Texas issued an order acquitting a defendant pursuant to F. R. Crim. P. 29 after a jury had convicted him of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  A Rule 29 acquittal after a jury verdict generally involves the court’s scrutiny of the evidence presented to the jury to determine whether it had been “insufficient to sustain a conviction.” 

A new report links the leadership of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group in Sudan embroiled in a civil war with the Sudanese military, to several luxury properties in Dubai. Family members, individuals under sanctions, and entities linked to Mohamed Hamdam Dagalo, known as Hemedti, the leader of the RSF, have amassed a vast property portfolio, including twenty luxury properties worth 17.7 million pounds, as part of a “paramilitary-industrial complex” across Africa and the Middle East.