On May 21, 2019, the South African Minister of Justice and Correctional Services Michael Masutha announced that his government intended to extradite Mozambique’s former finance minister Manuel Chang to Mozambique rather than the U.S.  In April the Kempton Park Magistrate’s Court ruled that Chang could be extradited to either country, leaving the decision to the South African government. Robert Mearkle, spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Pretoria, registered on behalf of the U.S. “great disappointment” that South Africa has decided to extradite Chang to Mozambique rather than to the U.S. where he is charged with fraud and other related crimes.  Civil society organizations in Mozambique suspect that Chang will evade charges in Mozambique for alleged complicity in a huge shipping contract scam which has cost Mozambique US $2 billion.  Mearkle said the U.S. embassy is holding discussions with the South African government and exploring options to review the decision.

On March 25, 2019, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres released an official statement to the Group of Governmental Experts on Emerging Technologies in the Area of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems, which meets under the auspices of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), in which he stated emphatically that “machines with the power and discretion to take lives without human involvement are politically unacceptable, morally repugnant and should be prohibited by international law.” Guterres’s statement is particularly timely because it points to a largely underdeveloped aspect of international law which must be addressed immediately: the lack of understanding on how AI and autonomous weapons systems (AWS) interact with existing international law. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming an integral part of war and warfare systems.The competition for advantages in war has manifested in recent years with the rapid progression of AWS is progressing rapidly and this manifestation seen as a highly destabilizing development.

The fight over Julian Assange has shown no sign of slowing down. On May 23, 2019, the U.S. raised the stakes, charging Assange with 17 additional crimes in violation of the Espionage Act. According to the indictment, the U.S. has charged Assange with conspiracy to receive national defense information, obtaining national defense information, and disclosure of national defense information, all alongside the initial charge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. The indictment stresses that Assange generally directed Manning to steal vast numbers of secret documents, including State Department cables, documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay Detainee assessment briefs. Manning initially released these documents, the indictment notes, in response to a list published by WikiLeaks titled “Most Wanted Leaks” in 2009. Eventually, she entered into direct communication with Assange. For example, when Manning noted that she may have run out of classified documents to illegally disclose, Assange noted, “curious eyes never run dry.”

On May 27, 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union, Grand Chamber, (the Court) delivered two judgments giving its interpretation of one of the key concepts underlying the European Arrest Warrant scheme based on the 2002 Framework Decision,[2] that is, the “judicial issuing authority.” This is not the first time that the Court has been called to clarify the legal elements of the EAW procedure. Two Lithuanian nationals and one Romanian national are challenging, before the Irish courts, the execution of European arrest warrants issued by German public prosecutor’s offices and the Prosecutor General of Lithuania for the purposes of criminal prosecution. They are accused of crimes described as murder and grievous bodily injury (OG), armed robbery (PF) and organized or armed robbery (PI). OG brought an action before the High Court challenging the validity of that European arrest warrant, on the ground, inter alia, that the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Lübeck is not a ”judicial authority” within the meaning of Article 6(1) of Framework Decision 2002/584.

On May 16, 2019, the U.S. Attorney Scott W. Brady of the Western District of Pennsylvania and Europol announced from Europol’s headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands that a joint law enforcement operation has dismantled a complex transnational organized crime network using GozNym malware to steal an estimated $100 million from unsuspecting victims in the United States and around the world.  GozNym infected tens of thousands of victim computers worldwide, mainly in the U.S. and Europe.  An important feature of the operation was the unprecedented initiation of criminal prosecutions against members of the network in four different countries as a result of cooperation between the U.S., Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Germany, Bulgaria, Europol, and Eurojust. The operation was conducted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania and the FBI’s Pittsburgh Field Office, along with Europol, Eurojust, and prosecutors and/or law enforcement agencies in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldova, and Germany. An indictment unsealed on May  16 returned by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh charges 10 members of the GozNym criminal network with conspiracy to commit computer fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.  Previously, a related indictment charged an eleventh member of the conspiracy.  The victims of these crimes were primarily U.S. businesses and their financial institutions, including a number of victims located in the Western District of Pennsylvania.

On May 16, 2019, U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr, during the 3^rd Ministerial of the Northern Triangle Attorneys General in El Salvador, announced that, as part of a coordinated law enforcement action known as Operation Regional Shield, President Trump has approved continued funding for law enforcement efforts between the U.S. and the Northern Triangle countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras). In particular Barr said the U.S. will continue to fund law enforcement efforts through a number of mechanisms. These include the ongoing work of the project’s law enforcement efforts, as well as the continuing work of the U.S. Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development Assistance and Training (OPDAT) Resident Legal Advisors in each of the three countries. They additionally include the FBI’s Transnational Anti-Gang teams, and the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Sensitive Investigative Units, and Homeland Security’s (HSI) work to counter human smuggling and trafficking.

On May 8, 2019, Danish economic prosecutors charged ten former leading employees of Danske Bank in connection with Danish police economic unit SØIK’s investigation into money laundering involving the bank’s Estonian branch. Among the defendants is Henrik Ramlau-Hansen, the former chair of the Financial Supervisory Authorities, Denmark’s financial regulator, from 2016 to 2018, and former finance director of Danske Bank.  The Danish economic police raided his house in connection with a €200 billion money laundering scandal.  The prosecutor charged him with failure to prevent certain transactions at Danske Bank for which he was finance direction from 2011 until 2015. In October 2013, he allegedly attended an important meeting when Danske executives discussed the non-resident portfolio in Estonia, according to minutes of the meeting. Prosecutors brought the charges soon after U.S. authorities requested their first interviews in the case, apparently indicating cooperation between Danish and U.S. authorities.

On May 9, 2019, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the federal grand jury indictment of a Chinese hacking group accused of stealing the information of more than 78 million individuals. The indictment charges Fujie Wang, alongside other members of the hacking group, including a John Doe, with four counts: “one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in relation to computers and identity theft, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and two substantive counts of intentional damage to a protected computer.” The indictment alleges that Wang and his fellow hackers broke into four U.S.-based businesses, including Anthem, Inc., a health insurance company, alongside companies based in the technology, basic materials, and communications sectors, which the indictment refers to as Victim Businesses 1, 2, and 3. The hacking group applied a variety of techniques to break into these businesses’ computer networks, including spearfishing and malware.

On May 10, 2019, in remarks to the American Bar Association’s program on “Antitrust in the Americas,” in Buenos Ares, Argentina, Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim heralded progress in global competition enforcement cooperation. In June 2018, the U.S. announced cooperation with a group of leading competition agencies on an initiative for a Multilateral Framework on Procedures (MFP).  The initial group of competition agencies that developed this initiative included Brazil’s CADE, Canada’s Competition Bureau, Chile’s FNE, and Mexico’s COFECE.  The joint initiative had the goal of establishing fundamental procedural norms and achieving commitment from participating agencies to abide by these norms.  The MFP initiative combined widely accepted procedural fairness norms, such as transparency, non-discrimination, access to counsel, and judicial review, with an adherence, cooperation, and review mechanism. More than 50 competition agencies now participate in the MFP. On April 3, 2019, the International Competition Network (ICN) Steering Group adopted the norms in the MFP proposal, as well as meaningful adherence, review, and cooperation mechanisms within an ICN instrument in the form of the “Framework on Competition Agency Procedures” (CAP).

On May 7, 2019, the United States government announced Malaysia has extradited Ng Chong Hwa, 46, and a Malaysian national, also known as “Roger Ng,” to face charges of conspiring to launder billions of dollars embezzled from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), Malaysia’s investment development fund.  The indictment also charges him with conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) by paying bribes to multiple government officials in Malaysia and Abud Dhabi, and conspiring to violate the FCPA by circumventing the internal accounting controls of a major New York-headquartered financial institution. On May 10, 2019, the U.S. government announced the unsealing of a four-count indictment in the District of Columbia for conspiring to make and conceal foreign and conduit campaign contributions during the U.S. presidential election in 2012.