UN expert says US boat strikes may be crimes against humanity

A UN human rights expert has concluded that U.S. strikes on vessels accused of drug trafficking in the Caribbean and Pacific breached international law and could amount to crimes against humanity, sharply escalating scrutiny of a military campaign that has killed more than 220 people.

Ben Saul, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur, said in a briefing note that there were “reasonable grounds to believe” the reported attacks constituted crimes against humanity of murder under customary international law. His report cited 68 U.S. strikes outside U.S. territorial waters that killed 223 people.

The strikes have been carried out since September as part of a U.S. military operation known as “Southern Spear,” which officials say is aimed at stopping drugs from being trafficked by sea to the United States. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has previously said the campaign is intended to remove “narco-terrorists from our hemisphere” and protect the United States from “the drugs that are killing our people.”

Saul rejected the legal basis offered by the United States, including claims that the attacks were acts of self-defense against designated terrorist organizations. “Even assuming that the vessels and crew attacked were members of the criminal groups listed as terrorist, such organizations have not mounted any ‘armed attack’ on the United States so as to trigger a right of self-defence,” he wrote.

He said the attacks amounted to “serial extrajudicial killings” and violated the right to life because they were not justified under national or personal self-defense, international humanitarian law, the law of the sea, narcotics suppression conventions or international counterterrorism law.

The report came two days after U.S. Southern Command said it had carried out another strike in the Caribbean, killing four people. In a statement accompanying a grainy video, Southcom said it had “executed a lethal, kinetic strike on a go-fast vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean.” It added: “Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking. The operation killed four narco-terrorists.”

The United States has not publicly identified the people killed in that strike or provided details of the intelligence it said confirmed their involvement in drug trafficking. More broadly, U.S. officials have not offered definitive public evidence that the targeted vessels were engaged in trafficking, the BBC reported.

Tallies of the campaign differ. Saul’s report cites 68 attacks and 223 deaths. The Guardian reported that the strikes have killed more than 230 people, while figures from organizations such as the Washington Office on Latin America put the toll at 234 people in 66 attacks.

The UN, human rights organizations, lawyers and international law experts had already described the boat bombings as extrajudicial killings, according to The Guardian. Saul’s assessment went further by saying the pattern of attacks could meet the threshold for crimes against humanity.

The BBC said it contacted the White House and State Department for a response. The Guardian reported that the State Department had not yet responded to a request for comment.

The strikes initially drew strong criticism from Latin American leaders whose citizens were targeted. The BBC reported that Nicolás Maduro, who was the Venezuelan leader at the time and opposed the strikes, was seized by U.S. forces in a highly controversial night-time raid on Caracas at the beginning of the year. Another critic, Colombia’s then-left-wing president Gustavo Petro, stood down in August after a Trump-backed candidate won June’s presidential election.

The Guardian reported that President Donald Trump recently claimed the bombings had stopped 97% of all illegal drugs entering the United States by sea, but said available data showed the attacks had no impact on the volume of cocaine entering the country.