Saul documents 68 attacks killing 223 people in Caribbean and Pacific
A United Nations report released Monday concluded that US military airstrikes on vessels allegedly trafficking drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific may constitute crimes against humanity, finding that 68 strikes since September 2025 killed at least 223 people outside US territorial waters.
Special Rapporteur Ben Saul, in a briefing note published by the UN Human Rights Council, wrote 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.” He concluded 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’s legal reasoning rests on the position that even if those targeted could be identified as members of designated terrorist organizations, they had not carried out an armed attack on the United States — the threshold required under international law to invoke a right to self-defense. All of the documented strikes occurred outside US territorial waters.
The US military has consistently described those killed as “narco-terrorists.” US Southern Command, which commands US forces in the region, said of the latest strike that “confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking” and that the operation killed four narco-terrorists. BBC News has contacted the White House and State Department for comment on the report.
Officials have not publicly offered definitive evidence that the vessels targeted were involved in trafficking, a point international-law experts have raised since the campaign began. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the operation, known as Southern Spear and launched in early September 2025, is aimed at removing “narco-terrorists from our hemisphere” and securing the US from “the drugs that are killing our people.”
The strikes drew strong criticism from Latin American leaders early in the campaign, including those whose citizens were among the dead. One such critic, Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, was seized by US forces in a controversial night-time raid on Caracas at the beginning of this year. Colombia’s left-wing president at the time, Gustavo Petro, another vocal opponent of Southern Spear, stood down in August after a Trump-backed candidate won June’s presidential election.