On April 7, 2026, Australian authorities charged a former elite soldier, Ben Roberts-Smith, on Tuesday with five counts of war crimes—specifically murder—related to the deaths of Afghan nationals between 2009 and 2012. Roberts-Smith has already suffered a loss in civil court on the matter when he brought a defamation suit against nine newspapers that ran the story.

On April 7, 2026, Indonesia deported one of Scotland’s highest-profile alleged mafia figures to Amsterdam, ten days after his arrest in Bali. Officers from Spain’s Guardia Civil escorted Steven Lyons onto a flight in Jakarta.

On April 11, 2026, Hoang Van Thai, 39, a Vietnamese man, pleaded guilty to two charges of possessing protected wildlife parts without a license. Hoang Van Thai was convicted of possessing 1,022 gall bladders and 191 tongues of reticulated pythons, a protected wildlife species under the Wildlife Conservation Act 2010, without a license.

On March 30, 2026, the United States (U.S.) Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) sent to the Federal Register a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to implement a whistleblower program by creating a framework to offer incentives and protections to encourage individuals to report information on fraud-related violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), U.S. sanctions programs managed by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and several other laws vital to protecting the U.S. financial system and national security.

On April 1, 2026, Cambodia extradited Li Xiong, a former leader at a Cambodian financial conglomerate accused of money laundering and being a core member of Chinese-Cambodian businessman Chen Zhiu’s criminal financial network.[1] On April 3, Cambodia’s parliament enacted the first law devoted to targeting scam centers accused of defrauding international victims.

Anssaf Ali Mayo, a Yemeni citizen, parliamentarian, and prominent member of the al-Islah party, brought a lawsuit against Hungarian-Israeli Abraham Golan and Americans Isaac Gilmore and Dale Comstock, all former executives or employees of Spear Operations Group, a private military company incorporated in Delaware.

On March 26, 2026, the European Parliament (EP) adopted a legislative resolution, which approves a new directive establishing a harmonized criminal law framework to prevent and combat corruption across the European Union (EU).[2]

In March 2026, a Brussels court ordered a former Belgian diplomat, Étienne Davignon, to face trial for war crimes for his role in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, an anticolonial and socialist activist and the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

On March 16, 2026, a federal jury convicted former Syrian prison official Samir Ousman Alsheikh, 73, of one count of conspiracy to commit torture and three counts of torture for his role in the persecution of inmates at Adra Prison in Damascus, Syria. Alsheikh was also convicted of lying to U.S. immigration officials about his past in order to secure a green card in the hopes of eventually becoming a naturalized citizen.

On March 19, 2026, the United States (U.S.) Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a resolution of a transnational corruption investigation into Balt SAS (Balt), a medical device company headquartered in France, concerning an alleged scheme to pay bribes to a physician official who acted in a senior position of a state-owned public hospital in France, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).