By: Staff Writer
September 29, 2026
A United Nations Special Report calls the U.S. Caribbean boat strikes unlawful as experts assert it breached international law.
The report by Special Rapporteur Ben Saul said since September last year there had been at least 68 US strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, outside US territorial waters, which killed more than 220 people.
Saul said that, even if targets could be identified as members of designated terrorist groups, they had not staged an armed attack on the US which would trigger a right to self-defence under international law.
The report comes two days after the US military said it killed four people in a strike on a vessel in the Caribbean.
“These systematic killings gravely violate the fundamental obligation to respect the right to life. International law does not permit governments to simply murder alleged criminals at sea, just as the police cannot summarily execute people on the street in United States territory,” the experts said.
They rejected the U.S. Government’s legal claims justifying the attacks.
“Drug cartels and gangs are not carrying out armed attacks against the United States, and therefore there is no right of self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations. Drug trafficking is a law enforcement matter governed by international human rights law on the use of force. Calling it war does not make it one,” the experts said.
“Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking. The operation killed four narco-terrorists,” Southcom, which commands US forces in the region, said in a statement about the latest attack, which was accompanied by a grainy video.
But in a briefing note released by the UN Human Rights Council on Monday, Saul said that “such 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”.
“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,” Saul concluded.