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A UN report has concluded that the United States’s boat strike campaign against supposed drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean has violated international law and “plausibly” amounts to crimes against humanity, a label reserved for the worst human rights violations in global conflicts.
The report says that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that the boat strikes constitute “crimes against humanity of murder” under international law because they targeted civilians, and not those classified as combatants under any formal category of international law or otherwise.
The attacks “amount to serial extrajudicial killings in violation of the right to life, being unjustified in national or personal self-defence or under international humanitarian law, the international law of the sea, narcotics suppression conventions, or international counter-terrorism law,” the report says.
“There are reasonable grounds to believe that the reported 68 attacks that killed 223 people constituted crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law,” it goes on. “Murder means the unlawful killing of a person where the perpetrator intended to cause death or knew that it would occur in the ordinary course of events. The killings of 223 people are unlawful and intentional under international law.”
The report was written by Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism Ben Saul, who has previously condemned the strikes as murders.
The U.S. has defended the strikes as lawful and conducted in “self-defense.”
But Saul has rejected that narrative, saying: “The concept of an imminent threat to life does not stretch to encompass an attenuated chain of causation in which potential future deaths result from drug consumption after numerous intervening steps occur.” Family members have previously said that those killed in some strikes were just fishermen.
Since the report was drafted, the U.S. has carried out several more strikes, bringing the total to 70, with 234 killed, according to The New York Times’s tally. In the latest report of the attacks released by the U.S. Southern Command on social media, the military claims without evidence that a strike was carried out on a vessel that supposedly had “active involvement in narco-trafficking,” and that it killed “four narco-terrorists.” Grainy footage of the blast shows a vessel being struck by a missile that immediately explodes into a massive, fiery plume.
Saul noted the unprecedented nature of the U.S.’s designation of “narco-terrroists.” He said that such designations do not change laws regarding conflict and civilian harm, and noted that drug trafficking does not amount to military force. He also acknowledged the Trump administration’s attempts to punish military veterans in Congress who have reminded soldiers of their right to disobey unlawful orders.
“United States military law prohibits war crimes, murder and manslaughter including extraterritorially,” Saul wrote. “The Government has regrettably penalized former military personnel who called on United States forces to disobey illegal orders, rather than those who allegedly committed unlawful killings.”
He called on the U.S. government to prosecute the perpetrators of the strikes “for crimes (such as murder and crimes against humanity) reflecting the seriousness of the attacks,” as well as to provide remedies for the families of those killed.
Saul’s report comes just days after a UN fact-finding mission found that the U.S. committed war crimes in two strikes on Iran, including on an elementary school in Minab, conducted on the first day of the war, killing nearly 200 civilians.
The report also finds that the U.S.’s “transboundary abductions” of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife — and the accompanying military raid – also constitute violations of international law, likening it to the U.S.’s widely condemned 1989 invasion of Panama. It also condemns President Donald Trump’s seizure of Venezuela’s oil revenues as amounting to several potential violations.
“There is no international right to use of force to suppress alleged ‘narco-terrorism.’ Aggression resulting in deprivation of life ipso facto violates the right to life. The use of force also violated Venezuela’s sovereignty and the international duty of non-intervention,” Saul wrote.
Trump’s threats to use force against Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia in relation to drug trafficking are also prohibited by international law, the report finds.
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