On December 18, 2025, two Colombian nationals, Hernando Manuel De La Cruz Rivera Orjuela (alias “El Patrón”) and Luis Enrique Linero Pinto (“El Calvo”), made their initial court appearance in El Paso, Texas, after being extradited from Colombia to face federal charges stemming from a large-scale human smuggling conspiracy.

On November 27 and 28, 2025, officers from South Africa’s elite Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks) arrested four men at Johannesburg’s OR Tambo International Airport, suspected of having illegally enlisted in the Russian military.

 The United States (U.S.) is acting against Caribbean Citizenship by Investment (CBI), and the European Union is threatening action.

On December 22, 2025, the United States (U.S.) Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the seizure of a web domain and database that criminals employed to carry out a scheme targeting and defrauding Americans through bank account takeover fraud. Criminals used the domain, web3adspanels.org, as a backend web panel to store and manipulate illegally harvested bank login credentials.

On December 10, 2025, following an Informal Ministerial Conference in Strasbourg on human rights day, the Deputies of the Council of Europe (CoE) Ministers of Justice made unanimously several important decisions addressing, among other issues, the pressing problem of a phenomenon of immigration in the context of both the human rights enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). 

On December 10, 2025, a Bulgarian court denied Lebanon’s request to extradite the owner of a ship connected to a cargo of ammonium nitrate, which is alleged to have caused a powerful 2020 port explosion in Beirut.

The Basel Institute on Governance released the 14th Public Edition of the Basel AML Index in 2025.[2] The Index provides a comparative assessment of money laundering and related financial crime risks across jurisdictions worldwide.

In order for INTERPOL to approve a government’s request for the publication of a Red Notice, such request must include “sufficient judicial data,” which under Article 83(2)(b)(i) of INTERPOL’s Rules on the Processing of Data (RPD) includes, among other elements, “summary of facts of the case, which shall provide a succinct and clear description of the criminal activities of the wanted person, including the time and location of the alleged criminal activity.”[1]  Compared with several other key provisions of INTERPOL’s rules, the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (Commission or CCF), a body with the exclusive jurisdiction to adjudicate complaints from individuals challenging government use of INTERPOL’s channels, has developed significant jurisprudence concerning this requirement.

On December 12, 2025, the U.S. Department of Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the removal of Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and his family for the role of the Justice in the prosecution of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro for his role in trying to overturn Brazil’s 2022 election.

On December 4^th, 2025, Cambodian authorities targeted Huione Group, a notorious money laundering front for global hacker networks and cyber criminals. Huione Group provides refuge for global scammers, who often operated out of various countries across Southeast Asia. Essentially, Huione Group recruits various criminals and scammers through social media networks and then launders the scammers’ criminal proceeds through illegitimate businesses. Huione Group’s often launders money from victims that were scammed in the United States (U.S.), sending the money between multiple other countries, converting the money into cryptocurrencies, making it harder for law enforcement to trace the illicit transactions.