On April 19, 2018, the EU Commissioners welcomed the adoption by the European Parliament of the 5^th Anti-Money Laundering Directive. On April 17, 2108, the European Commission adopted a directive on the rules to facilitate the use of financial and other information for the prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of certain criminal offenses.

On April 17, 2018, the European Commission released two proposals concerning e-evidence. Both aim at improving cross-border access to electronic evidence.

On April 20, 2018, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed a 66-page complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Russian Federation, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU), Guccifer 2.0, a Russian oligarch (Aras Iskenerovich Agalarov and his son Emin Araz), WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc., Donald J. Trump Jr., Paul J. Manafort, Jr., Roger J. Stone, Jr., Jared C. Kushner, George Papadopoulos, and Richard W. Gates, III.

On April 14, 2018, during the VIII Summit of the Americas, the heads of government agreed to the Lima Commitment with respect to "Democratic Governance against Corruption."  During the summit Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra, the summit’s host, urged the region to have a “zero tolerance” policy on corruption.  Vizcarro assumed office only weeks before the summit, replacing Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who resigned before a second impeachment attempt against him for his alleged lies regarding his firm’s receipt of payments from Odebrecht and alleged vote buying.

On March 8, 2018, eleven governments signed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that brings many new enforcement cooperation provisions. This article highlights some of the enforcement cooperation provisions of the TPP.

Transnational Organized Crime in Latin America and the Caribbean sets forth an overview and introduction to the topic.  As the author mentions, the challenge of transnational organized crime and associated public insecurity has evolved beyond what can be readily solved by repressive measures or actions against the leadership of criminal groups alone. The solution requires addressing a host of interrelated challenges in a coordinated fashion, going beyond attacking criminal organizations and their leaderships, but also strengthening the economic, social, and governmental institutions of the host societies whose weakness and corruption create an environment in which criminality can spread.

On February 27, 2018, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the seminal data privacy case of the term, United States v. Microsoft Corp. At issue in the case is whether the warrant provisions of the Stored Communications Act (SCA) apply extraterritorially, such that they compel Microsoft, an electronic service provider to produce private electronic communications stored on servers in Ireland for the United States government. Microsoft argues that the SCA does not apply to electronic communications stored in overseas data centers; the U.S. government begs to differ.

On March 29, 2018, the European Court of Human Rights – Fifth Section (ECtHR or the Court) delivered a decision in the case of Krombach v. France (application no. 67521/14). It declared (unanimously) the application inadmissible. The decision is final. This is the last act in the 36-years-long Krombach/Bamberski story which would lend an excellent script for a good criminal movie. It has had all elements to build a suspense expected from such a movie: young girl, alleged rape, murder (or at least homicide), mysterious circumstances of a death, criminal charges and multiple investigations in two different jurisdictions arising out of the same action, civil litigation, kidnapping across state border, multiple convictions, and international tribunals involved in this case.