On Friday, the Trump Administration used military personnel to sink yet a fourth Venezuelan small boat, again killing all aboard, in his “war on cartels.”
Trump sank the first boat on September 3. The President has claimed, but has provided no evidence, that the boats were smuggling drugs into the United States. Trafficking drugs is not a capital offense. Congress has not authorized armed conflict.
Monday, the New York City Bar Association issued a press statement calling the attacks “unlawful” and the deaths “murder.”
None of these attacks was authorized under U.S. law and, as explained below, each of them appears to be an unlawful summary execution prohibited by both U.S. and international law. Although the President has, without proof, characterized the victims as “terrorists” and drug traffickers, that claim, even if true, provides no justification for these unlawful executions…
Both U.S. and international law provide authority for law enforcement officials to arrest alleged drug traffickers or other individuals suspected of terrorist acts… There is, however, neither a lawful nor factual justification to engage our armed forces to use lethal force in international waters in the absence of lawful armed conflict or self-defense.
We therefore call upon the President to desist from any further unlawful attacks on the high seas. We also call upon Congress to remind the President that he lacks authority to continue to misuse our military forces for similar unlawful attacks on foreign vessels and their civilian crews and that continuation of such attacks is unlawful. Congress and the courts have a critical role in requiring the President to comply with the Constitution and our treaties with respect to the use of armed force, and they must not abdicate that responsibility in the case of these (and threatened future) attacks.
Being a statement from a bar association, it details the limits on presidential war powers; authorization of interdiction of narcotics traffickers; and international treaty violations. It calls for Congressional action in closing, where it characterizes these deaths as murder.
Because the recent attacks on Venezuelan vessels and their crews were unauthorized by U.S. law and in violation of binding international law, they were illegal summary executions – murders. It is imperative that Congress act promptly, as pending legislation proposes, to make clear to the President and the nation that the President’s threat of similar attacks on Venezuelan vessels (and on Venezuela itself) are unlawful and must not be repeated. Only by doing so can Congress bring our nation into compliance with the Constitution and international law, reduce the risk of hostilities with neighboring countries and assure that similar abuses of Presidential power do not expand to American shores (emphasis added).
Sarah Yager, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, has called the attacks “extrajudicial killings.”
Celeste Kmiotek, a senior staff lawyer at the Atlantic Council, told Al Jazeera that “no congressional consent or specific Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) covers anti-drug operations in Venezuela.” In addition:
The United States is a signatory to human rights treaties including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Article 6 of the covenant establishes that no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of their life, and Article 4 specifies that states cannot make derogations (that is, formal exemptions) related to this right, even in times of public emergency. As noted by former US State Department Attorney-Adviser Brian Finucane, the US Department of Defense Operational Law Handbook views the prohibition of murder under IHRL as a peremptory rule under customary international law, meaning a rule “so fundamental and universally accepted that [it does] not permit any derogation, even by treaty.” Assessed according to these criteria, this strike appears to have been an extrajudicial killing in violation of IHRL and Department of Defense provisions.
These are war crimes, and we are going to need a 21st century equivalent of the Nuremberg trials when this chaos is over.
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com