On November 11, 2019, Gambia instituted proceedings against Myanmar before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) claiming the maltreatment of the Rohingya community constituted genocidal acts in breach of the Genocide Convention, to which both States are parties.[1] The case focuses on the ill-treatment of the Rohingya ethnic and Muslim minority, mainly in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, by the Myanmar military and local militia, which has been described by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as a ‘textbook example of ethnic cleansing.’[2]

On January 22, 2020, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) re-submitted its request pursuant to Article 19(3) of the Rome Statute for a ruling on the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in the Palestine situation. The original request was filed on December 20, 2019.[1] On that day, the Prosecutor also applied for an extension of the page limit applicable to requests submitted under Article 19(3).

On February 3, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) signed a trilateral agreement with the governments of Nigeria and Jersey to repatriate approximately $308 million of embezzled and/or stolen funds of former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha and his co-conspirators to Nigeria.[1]

On January 31, 2020, Airbus SE (the Company), a global supplier of civilian and military aircraft headquartered in France, agreed to pay penalties of more than $3.9 billion to resolve transnational corruption and other charges with authorities in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom arising out of Airbus’s scheme to use third-party business partners to bribe government officials, as well as non-governmental airline executives, worldwide and to resolve the Company’s  violation of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and its implementing regulations, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), in the United States.  The case is the largest transnational corruption resolution to date.[1]

On January 23, 2020, Bulgarian prosecutors charged three Russians in absentia for the attempted murder of a weapons manufacturer, his son, and the production manager of the company.[1] According to Sofia City Prosecutor’s Office (SGP), the three suspects tried to poison the victims internationally ‘by intoxication with an unidentified phosphorus-organic substance.”[2] The three suspects clandestinely entered Bulgaria using fake passports and used an organophosphate poison in an effort “to deliberately kill” the arms manufacturer, Emilian Gebrev, the owner of EMCO Ltd., his son Hristo Gebrev, and manager Valentin Takhchiev between April 28 and May 4, 2015.[3]

On January 23, 2020, Armengol Alfosno Cevallos Diaz (Cevallos), an Ecuadorian businessman living in Miami, Florida, pleaded guilty in connection with a $4.4 million bribery and money laundering scheme that transferred bribes to public officials of Empresa Pública de Hidrocarburos del Ecuador (PetroEcuador), the state-owned and state-controlled oil company of Ecuador.[1]

On January 15, 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union, National Immigrant Justice Center, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, and Human Rights First brought  a  lawsuit in U.S. District Court[1] challenging the Trump administration’s policies concerning Asylum Cooperation Agreement (also known as “safe third country” agreements) with Guatemala and other Northern Triangle countries that force individuals seeking asylum in the U.S. to apply for asylum in the same dangerous region from which they have fled.

On December 9, 2019, Genaro Garcia Luna, former Secretary of Public Security under President Felipe Calderon from 2006 to 2012, was arrested in Dallas, Texas. His indictment, released the next day, revealed that he was facing “three counts of cocaine trafficking and one count of making false statements.”[1] Given that he was arrested in Texas, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) will seek to conduct the trial in the court of the Eastern District of New York.[2]

On January 23, 2020, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement (J5) announced its first coordinated set of enforcement actions undertaken on a global scale on the preceding day. The operation results from a series of investigations in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

On January 17, 2020, Samherji’s acting chief executive Björgólfur Jóhannsson issued a statement, confirming his company’s withdrawal from its businesses in Namibia, including a N$400 million[1] vessel it purchased with Namibians, using state-allocated fishing quotas.[2]