On October 6, 2025, Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court convicted Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, also known as “Ali Kushayb,” of twenty-seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity arising from the 2003–2004 attacks on the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities of West Darfur. The judgment is the first conviction in the Darfur situation, the first in any situation referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council, and the Court’s first conviction for gender-based persecution—on the novel basis that Fur men of fighting age were targeted because of a “perceived gender role” associating masculinity with combatant status. The decision confronts three doctrinal questions: Article 22(1) legality for nationals of non-states parties reached by Security Council referral; intersectionality of gender, ethnicity, and political identity under Article 7(1)(h); and fair trial guarantees under territorial-state non-cooperation. The judgment is nevertheless not final; the defence appealed on November 6, 2025; the reparations phase opened on December 9, 2025, the same day the twenty-year sentence was issued.

On December 11, 2025, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights delivered a landmark judgment in Tsaava and Others v. Georgia. The case arose from the Georgian authorities’ forceful dispersal of major public protests outside the Georgian Parliament in Tbilisi on the night of June 20–21, 2019, also known as “Gavrilov’s night.” Thousands of people gathered to protest the authorities’ invitation to Sergei Gavrilov, an outspoken member of the Russian Duma, to sit in the chair reserved for the Speaker of the Georgian Parliament. The Grand Chamber found extensive violations of the European Convention on Human Rights stemming from the state’s violent dispersal of the protest and the excessive and indiscriminate use of “less-lethal” weapons, specifically kinetic impact projectiles and rubber bullets, against demonstrators and journalists. Beyond vindicating individual applicants, the Grand Chamber directed Georgia to take specific measures to conduct an effective investigation into the events and to put in place domestic regulations on crowd control and the limits of police force.