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.

In a landmark decision, on April 13, 2026, a French corporation and its executives were found guilty of helping to fund international terrorism. French cement company Lafarge has been officially charged in the Paris Criminal Court with aiding and financing international terrorism, with four executives receiving multiyear prison sentences and the firm itself ordered to pay €1.125 million, the maximum penalty in fines.

In late April 2026, the United States (U.S.) Department of Justice (DOJ) unveiled charges against two Chinese nationals for their role in managing scam centers across the Thai-Burmese border region and Cambodia. The scammers mainly targeted Americans by convincing them to invest in fraudulent cryptocurrency portfolios that promised high returns or by impersonating law enforcement, often demanding a sum of money from the victims.

On April 17, 2026—three years to the day since the civil war erupted between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan—the United States (U.S.) Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced sweeping sanctions against five individuals and entities linked to the recruitment and deployment of former Colombian military personnel to fight on behalf of the RSF.

On April 19, 2026, four people, including two United States (U.S.) officers of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.), were killed in a car crash in Chihuahua state in northern Mexico.[2] The victims included Pedro Román Oseguera Cervantes, director of the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency, and Manuel Genaro Méndez Montes, an agency officer and the driver; the U.S. agents have not yet been named.