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).

On March 19, 2026, a United States (U.S.) District Court in Tyler, Texas, granted summary judgment, invalidating and vacating the final rule requiring national reporting on certain persons involved in non-financed residential real estate transactions.

Over the past months, the Commission for the Control of INTERPOL’s Files (CCF), INTERPOL’s appellate body, has published its Annual Activity Report for 2024 and announced changes in its procedures that will affect how attorneys make submissions to the CCF.

INTERPOL declared Operation Synergia III complete on March 13, 2026. The operation, which ran from July 18, 2025, until January 31, 2026, across seventy-two countries, resulted in the removal of 45,000 harmful IP addresses and servers, the detention of ninety-four suspects, and the confiscation of 212 electronic gadgets. The operation aimed to combat specific threats, which included phishing, ransomware, malware distribution, romance scams, and credit card fraud. The operation represents the most recent effort in a continuous series of cyber disruption operations aiming to enhance organizational understanding and strengthen global collaboration.

Since February 28, 2026, the war between Israel and the United States (U.S.), on the one hand, and Iran, on the other, has sparked counter-terrorism enforcement initiatives in the Middle East and Europe. In particular, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwaiti law enforcement dismantled a terrorist network allegedly funded by Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran, while European enforcement authorities are investigating Iran’s suspected involvement in terrorist attacks on Jewish sites across Western Europe.

At a European Union (EU) summit on March 19, 2026, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán continued to veto both an EU financial aid package for Ukraine and a sanctions package targeting Russia, to the chagrin of the bloc’s leadership. Just shy of the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Prime Minister Orbán announced that EU member state Hungary would oppose both a European Union (EU) financial aid package to Ukraine and the sanctions package intended for Russia. Slovakia soon followed suit.

On March 5, 2026, in San José, Costa Rica, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) issued its advisory opinion No. 30/2025 on state obligations regarding human rights with respect to illicit firearms trafficking. It was adopted on December 3, 2025, following a request from the Mexican government, submitted on November 22 of the same year.^[2] In Advisory Opinion 30, the IACHR held that there is a State duty of due diligence regarding activities that may result in the illicit trafficking of firearms.