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 U.S., have killed more than 230 people. The latest, on Saturday, killed four people in the Caribbean.
The UN itself, along with several human rights organizations, 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-defense or under international humanitarian law, the international law of the sea, narcotics suppression conventions, or international counter-terrorism law”.
The report cites 68 U.S. attacks that killed 223 people. It is unclear how recently the figures were updated tallies by organizations such as the Washington Office on Latin America put the death toll at 234 people in 66 attacks.
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