The European Council appointed nine judges to the European Union Court of Justice General Court, the council said in a Dec. 21 news release. Six -- Lauri Madise and Iko Nomm of Estonia, Anna Marcoulli and Savvas Papasavvas of Cyprus, and Tuula Pynna and Heikki Kanninen of Finland -- were reappointed for a term running Sept. 1, 2022, through Aug. 31, 2028. Damjan Kukovec of Slovenia was appointed for a tenure running from the date of entry into force of the appointing decision until Aug. 31, 2025; the appointment is part of a phased addition of judges to the General Court that began in September 2019. Ioannis Dimitrakopoulos of Greece and Suzanne Kingston of Ireland were appointed for terms running until Aug. 31, 2022, and Aug. 31, 2025, respectively; the appointments fill unexpired terms of judges who received appointments to the Court of Justice.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration ordered Bahrain to pay more than $270 million in legal fees and damages to Iranian state-owned Bank Saderat and Bank Melli, The Washington Post reported. The win for the Iranian banks came after Bahrain's forced closure of Future Bank in 2015, the result of allegations that the institution facilitated money laundering and the evasion of U.S. and U.N. sanctions. A three-arbitrator panel at the court held that Bahrain violated its own banking policies, motivated primarily by a political animus toward Iran. Future Bank, established in Bahrain in 2004 with the backing of the two Iranian banks, was forced to close its doors a few weeks after the Iran nuclear agreement was signed by Iran and the U.S, along with five other world power countries.

The Court of Odense, Denmark, fined bunker fuel supplier Dan-Bunkering over $4.5 million for violating European Union sanctions when it sold 172,000 tons of jet fuel for use in Syria between 2015 and 2017, the EU Sanctions blog reported Dec. 18. The court also fined Dan-Bunkering's parent company, Bunker Holding, over $600,000 and sentenced Bunker Holding's CEO to four months in prison for the sanctions violations. Authorities seized over $2.3 million in profits from Dan-Bunkering. The court said the company intentionally violated the sanctions since it must have known that the Russian military would use the jet fuel in Syria. The sales were made to two Russian entities in 33 transactions.

The European Union is reopening an antidumping review into tartaric acid from China to comply with the European Court of Justice's Dec. 3 ruling, the European Commission said. The ruling concerned the commission's determination to find the normal value of tartaric acid in the review based on costs of production in Argentina, whereas in the initial investigation, the commission found normal value based on Argentinian domestic sales prices. The result was an increase in the antidumping duty for two exporting producers, Changmao Biochemical Engineering Co. and Ninghai Organic Chemical Factory, who saw their rates jump from 10.1% to 13.1% and 4.7% to 8.3%, respectively.

Vietnam's La Lay Customs Branch is launching legal action involving the illegal smuggling of tracwood, rosewood and chalkstone worth over $165,000, the state-run CustomsNews reported. Vietnamese Customs found the smuggled wood at the La Lay Border Gate in central Vietnam on the border with Laos, after inspecting seven container trucks registered to An Tran Import and Export Co., Ltd. The company was found to have made false declarations on the types of wood on board, some of it rare and precious wood. The report also said that the "containers held nearly 11,000 kg of ice (suspected to be chalkstone) without an import declaration." The legal action follows an interdisciplinary meeting between the Quang Tri Customs Department and the People's Procurary of various provinces, CustomsNews said.

The EU General Court issued judgments Nov. 24 in four Syria sanctions annulment applications. The court annulled Bashar Assi's and Khaldoun Al Zoubi's listings, noting the EU had failed to show that either man was a leading businessperson or associated with the regime when the sanctions acts were enacted, the opinion said.

The European Union General Court on Nov. 24 dismissed an application from the European Political Subdivision of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to drop its inclusion on the EU's terrorist sanctions list. The ruling upholds the group's place on the sanctions regime and said the European Council could rely on the 2001 decision by the United Kingdom home secretary to list the LTTE because the U.K. government is a "competent authority" for the purpose of making the sanctions listing. The court also said that the EU had sufficiently backed the listing action in 2019-2020.

The European Court of Justice on Nov. 23 overturned the General Court's 2019 ruling that dropped the 2018 actions maintaining Hamas on the EU's terrorist sanctions list. The General Court had said the statement of reasons for including Hamas missed certain procedural requirements, including that it was not signed, had no heading and could not be identified as an act of the European Council. The ECJ, basing its ruling in part on a June opinion by the advocate general, held that the law does not require the council president to sign the statement of reasons and that "Article 15 of the Council’s Rules of Procedure cannot therefore be interpreted as imposing on the President and on the Secretary-General of the Council a stricter signature requirement than that" of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The November ruling ultimately held that the European Council's actions designating Hamas as a terrorist group did not violate the procedural requirements included in making such a designation, dismissing Hamas' lawsuit.

The European Court of Justice dismissed an appeal brought by Iranian company Fulmen that sought greater damage payments than had previously been awarded to it by the EU General Court. In a recent judgment, the ECJ said that the General Court was right to find that Fulmen hadn't established a sufficient link between its designation and the alleged damaged suffered, and that other reasons could explain the dip in its market shares. Further, the court said that the General Court sufficiently backed its reasons for determining the level of compensation that it did.

The United Kingdom's High Court of Justice dismissed a challenge from Egyptian national and sanctioned individual Hany Youssef over whether the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act complies with Articles 6 and 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, according to a Nov. 26 judgment. Articles 6 and 8 guarantee the right of access to a court and protect the right to private and family life, respectively. Youssef was sanctioned by the United Nations Al-Qaida and Taliban Financial Sanctions Committee in 2005. Following the passage of SAMLA in 2018, the Egyptian national sought to have his UN sanctions listing removed via the U.K. government, eventually arguing that the U.K. judicial system's inability to order the U.K. government to quash a UN sanctions listing is in violation of the ECHR.