A U.N. Special Rapporteur Concluded There Are 'Reasonable Grounds to Believe' the 68 U.S. Strikes That Killed 223 People on Boats in the Caribbean and Pacific 'Constituted Crimes Against Humanity of Murder.' Two Days Earlier, Southcom Announced It Had Killed Four More 'Narco-Terrorists.'

A United Nations human rights expert has concluded that the U.S. military's year-long campaign of airstrikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific broke international law and may amount to crimes against humanity, the most severe legal finding yet against an operation that has killed more than 220 people.

In a briefing note released by the U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday, Ben Saul, the special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, counted at least 68 U.S. strikes on vessels in international waters since early September 2025. "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 wrote.

Saul said the 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." Even if those on board could be shown to belong to groups the administration has designated as terrorist organizations, he wrote, they had not carried out an armed attack on the United States that would trigger a right of self-defense. The dead, the note says, include fishermen, migrants and trafficking victims.

The report landed two days after U.S. Southern Command announced its latest strike. "Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel's active involvement in narco-trafficking. The operation killed four narco-terrorists," Southcom said in a statement accompanied by a grainy black-and-white video of a small boat exploding. The Pentagon has not released evidence that any of the targeted vessels were carrying drugs, and it has not identified the dead.

The findings build on a Sept. 1 statement in which Saul and eight other U.N. experts, including the special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Morris Tidball-Binz, put the one-year toll at 223 and demanded an immediate halt, independent investigations, accountability up the chain of command and reparations for victims' families. "Drug cartels and gangs are not carrying out armed attacks against the United States, and therefore there is no right of self-defence," they wrote, urging other governments to stop sharing intelligence that supports the strikes.

Saul's note also documents cases in which survivors of an initial strike were left in the water at known locations, and at least one in which two shipwreck survivors were subsequently targeted and killed. It flags vessels that sank with no claim of responsibility, among them the Ecuadorean fishing boat Fiorella, which lost eight of its 10 crew; that case has been referred to the U.N. Committee on Enforced Disappearances.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the operation, known as Southern Spear, is aimed at removing "narco-terrorists from our hemisphere" and protecting Americans from "the drugs that are killing our people." The two Latin American leaders who most loudly opposed the campaign are gone: Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro was seized by U.S. forces in a night raid on Caracas at the start of this year, and Colombia's Gustavo Petro left office in August after a Trump-backed candidate won June's election. BBC News said it had asked the White House and the State Department for a response to the report and had not received one.

Special rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the Human Rights Council; their findings carry no enforcement power but are routinely cited by prosecutors and courts. The United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court, and the administration is separately preparing new sanctions against that body.