On January 7, 2026, the United States (U.S.) military boarded and seized an oil tanker sailing under the Russian flag with alleged ties to Venezuela.[2] In 2024, the U.S. government sanctioned the vessel, named the Marinera, due to its alleged connections to the Iranian government and Hezbollah, in addition to Russia and Venezuela.

On January 2, 2025, the United States (U.S.) government sent special armed forces into Venezuela to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Shortly thereafter, U.S. President Donald Trump declared that the U.S. would “run the country.”

On December 10, 2025, the second International Conference of the Global Alliance to Counter Migrant Smuggling (“the Conference’) assembled in Brussels, hosted by the European Commission. During this conference, over fifty of the eighty delegations in attendance endorsed a Joint Declaration aimed at countering migrant smuggling through a series of actions emphasizing greater international cooperation, particularly in the digital sphere.

On December 19, 2025, the New York state governor, Kathy Hochul, vetoed a bill that would have obligated domestic (i.e., United States) companies operating in the state of New York to file their beneficial ownership information by January 1, 2027. New York law will remain in sync with the U.S. Corporate Transparency Act (the CTA). The latter obligates only foreign limited liability companies (LLCs) operating in the state to report their beneficial owners.

On December 17, 2025, Europol announced that law enforcement authorities in Europe and South America had disrupted efforts by criminal networks to transport cocaine into Europe.

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).