In a briefing note dated September 2026 and covered by the press on September 21, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Saul, set out his legal assessment of the U.S. military's campaign of strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats. “The United States military attacks are, however, contrary to international law, violate the human right to life, and plausibly constitute crimes against humanity,” he wrote. Counting through August, 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.”
Two cautions on what this is. A special rapporteur is an independent expert appointed by the Human Rights Council; the U.N. human rights office's standard note says such experts “are not UN staff” and that their views do not necessarily represent the United Nations. And “reasonable grounds to believe” is the evidentiary threshold U.N. inquiries use, not a judicial finding. Headlines saying “the UN says” overstate both points. Nor is the position new: on September 1, eight U.N. experts including Saul said that “International law does not permit governments to simply murder alleged criminals at sea,” though they went only as far as saying the attacks “may also constitute crimes against maritime safety.” What the note adds is the formal legal analysis.
The note's reasoning turns on the administration's own legal theory. In October 2025 the administration told Congress the United States is “in a non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels, which would make the laws of war apply. Saul rejects that premise: “Deaths from illicit drugs are not assimilable to an armed attack under international law,” and “International humanitarian law cannot authorize the United States' attacks.” For the same reason he writes that “the United States' attacks do not involve war crimes since no armed conflict exists,” and treats them instead as “serial extrajudicial killings” and potential crimes against humanity. That is a disagreement about which body of law applies, not about whether the killings were lawful; he concludes they were not under either.
He points to specific conduct. “In at least one incident, two shipwrecked survivors of an initial strike were subsequently targeted and killed,” he writes; the note does not date it, but the description matches the September 2025 follow-up strike (see U.S. Commanders Watched Two Survivors of the First Boat Strike Cling to the Wreckage for More Than 40 Minutes, Then Killed Them). He also cites “the Secretary of State's admission that vessels could have been intercepted but the United States instead chose to destroy them to deter other drug traffickers.” He says the United States should “prosecute the perpetrators (including military and political leaders who ordered the attacks),” and points to the precedent of the former president of the Philippines, who “is on trial for alleged crimes against humanity of murder for targeting suspected criminals.”
The administration had not responded when this was written; the BBC reported, “BBC News has contacted the White House and State Department for a response to the report.” Its standing position is the one it gave Congress: the White House has said “the President acted in line with the law of armed conflict to protect our country from those trying to bring deadly poison to our shores.” The strikes have continued; the Associated Press counted at least 231 dead in 69 strikes as of September 19 (see Trump's Undeclared Boat-Strike Campaign: At Least 231 Dead in 69 Strikes by September, and $4.7 Billion Spent by April). This is a separate document from the U.N. fact-finding mission's report on strikes in Iran (see UN Fact-Finding Mission Finds Reasonable Grounds to Believe the U.S. Committed War Crimes in Strikes on an Iranian School and Sports Center).