US strikes on alleged drug boats may be 'crimes against humanity', UN expert says
Ben Saul, the UN's special rapporteur on counterterrorism, concluded 68 US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that killed 223 people 'plausibly constitute crimes against humanity'.
A United Nations human rights expert has concluded that US military attacks on suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean violate international law and may amount to crimes against humanity.
In a report published on Monday, Ben Saul, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, said the US struck 68 vessels in international waters between September 2025 and August this year, killing at least 223 people.
“The United States military attacks are… contrary to international law, violate the human right to life, and plausibly constitute crimes against humanity,” the report said.
The US has defended the strikes as acts of self-defence against “narco-terrorists”, and President Donald Trump has told Congress the operations reflect a state of armed conflict with designated “terrorist” organisations. The report rejected that framing, arguing the US has no right to the use of force in self-defence against alleged drug trafficking, since drug trafficking does not meet the legal threshold of an “armed attack”.
It noted there “appears to be no factual basis” that some of the groups designated as “terrorists” by the US, such as Tren de Aragua, were acting as armed proxies of the Venezuelan state, and that less-lethal alternatives such as maritime interception were available — an option it said had been acknowledged as feasible by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The report said the killings meet the legal definition of murder as a crime against humanity, carried out “systematically” under an organised state policy and widespread “given the large number of victims”. It called on the US to investigate the killings, prosecute those responsible — including political and military leaders who ordered the strikes — and provide reparations to victims’ families.
It also questioned the campaign’s effectiveness: cocaine seizures at the US border have remained steady, much of the region’s cocaine moves through container ships that are rarely inspected rather than the small boats being targeted, and the strikes have done nothing to address fentanyl and opioids — not typically trafficked by sea from Venezuela and the leading cause of US overdose deaths. The military operations were estimated to have cost US$4.7bn by mid-2026.
The findings came two days after the US military announced it had killed four people in a strike on a vessel in the Caribbean Sea. Human rights groups have called the killings extrajudicial; the Pentagon has released videos of the strikes on social media but disclosed little about who was killed or what evidence tied them to drug trafficking.
Sources
More on this topic: all World stories
