UN expert accuses US of crimes against humanity over boat strikes

Speaking to the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee on 21 October, Ben Saul said the United States had killed at least 239 people in 71 military attacks on boats over the past year. Saul, the UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, called the strikes extrajudicial killings and said they amounted to a systematic attack on civilians — a crime against humanity. That is his legal assessment, not a ruling by the committee or a court.

The Trump administration takes a different view. In an October 2025 notice to Congress quoted in a US federal court ruling, the White House said the country was in a non-international armed conflict with designated organisations and was acting in self-defence. US Southern Command has announced individual strikes, including one in the Caribbean on 4 October that it said killed four people. Associated Press reported that the military did not provide evidence that the boat in that attack was carrying drugs.

The central question is whether suspected drug trafficking can justify military targeting. In an earlier report, Saul argued that it did not constitute an armed attack on the US and that neither an armed conflict nor an imminent threat to life justified the boat strikes he examined. Even if a vessel was carrying drugs, that alone would not settle the question of whether lethal force was lawful. His July report said the attacks *might* constitute crimes against humanity; his statement on Wednesday made that accusation more firmly.

The exact death toll is less certain than the scale of the campaign. Just Security’s incident timeline counted 238 dead in 71 strikes by 4 October, including 23 missing people presumed dead. AP reported at least 235 dead in 70 strikes after the attack that day. Those earlier tallies use figures drawn in large part from US announcements and do not establish that Saul’s later count is wrong.

Identifying the people killed is harder still. Airwars reported in August that only 26 of at least 227 people then counted had been publicly named. It said military videos often lacked the location and time details needed to reconstruct attacks. Senator Tim Kaine has said his review of classified records suggested some of those killed were not involved in drug trafficking; the records behind that assessment have not been made public.

A federal judge ruled in September on a separate dispute over access to the administration’s legal memorandum on the strikes. He rejected two grounds for withholding it but left another unresolved. The ruling did not decide whether the attacks were lawful, leaving the competing legal arguments — and the circumstances of most deaths — contested.