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.

On April 21, 2026, Reed D. Rubinstein, the Legal Adviser to the United States (U.S.) Department of State issued a memorandum (hereafter the Rubinstein memo), justifying the air attack on Iran (called @realDonaldTrump/posts/116147082884192486">Operation Epic Fury).[1] This article discusses the memo and critical responses to it from the international legal community.

On April 30, 2026, the Colombian government extradited a German national living in Colombia to the United States (U.S.) on charges that he owned and operated “The Versus Project” (hereafter Versus), an online dark web marketplace that enabled its over 380,000 registered users to buy and sell illegal goods.