US strikes on alleged drug boats may constitute ‘crimes against humanity’, UN finds

A special rapporteur for the UN human rights council has concluded that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that the United States attacks on boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Pacific and Caribbean “constituted crimes against humanity”.The boat strikes, carried out since September 2025 on the stated grounds of stopping drugs being trafficked by sea to the US, have killed more than 230 people. The latest, on Saturday, killed four people in the Caribbean.The UN itself, along with several human rights organisations, lawyers and international law experts, had already described the bombings as “extrajudicial killings”, but special rapporteur Ben Saul went further.In a briefing note posted by Saul on social media on Sunday night and first reported by the BBC, Saul wrote that, in addition to “serial extrajudicial killings”, the attacks were “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”.He added: “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.”The report cites 68 US attacks that killed 223 people. It is unclear how recently the figures were updated – tallies by organisations such as the Washington Office on Latin America put the death toll at 234 people in 66 attacks.US Southern Command, which has coordinated the attacks, posted on Saturday, alongside a grainy video, that it had “executed a lethal, kinetic strike on a go-fast vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Caribbean. Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking. The operation killed four narco-terrorists”.As has become standard in announcements of such attacks, the US did not identify the victims or provide any details about the alleged intelligence that supposedly confirmed their involvement in drug trafficking.Saul’s report rejects the claim made by Donald Trump before Congress that the strikes amounted to “self-defence” against “designated terrorist organizations”.The special rapporteur wrote that the crews were not “militarily armed and possessed the intent and capacity to launch military attacks” against the US.“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 added.The US Department of State has not yet responded to a request for comment.Although Trump recently claimed the bombings had stopped 97% of all illegal drugs entering the US by sea, according to available data, the attacks have had no impact on the volume of cocaine entering the US.Journalists and human rights groups have managed to identify some of the victims, who in many cases were innocent or, when suspected of involvement in criminal activity, were at best low-ranked participants in trafficking networks.