The US killed 11 people in a reported drone strike on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea on 3 September. Although it has not been confirmed that the strike was carried out by a drone, President Trump shared drone footage of the strike on his social media. In August it was revealed that Trump had secretly signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to begin military operations against drug cartels.
While US officials alleged that the boat targeted was carrying drugs being transported by members of the Tren de Aragua cartel, multiple legal scholars and experts have argued that the strike was “manifestly unlawful.”
Professor Luke Moffett of Queens University Belfast told the BBC that while “force can be used to stop a boat, generally this should be non-lethal measures.” Any use of force must be “reasonable and necessary in self-defence where there is immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life to enforcement officials.” The US and other states regularly stop boats in international waters as part of law enforcement activity without resorting to the use of lethal force.
Much more significantly, however, is the grave violation of international law that is deliberate, premeditated targeting of civilians. Claire Finkelstein, professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, said “There’s no authority for this whatsoever under international law. It was not an act of self-defense. It was not in the middle of a war. There was no imminent threat to the United States.” Finklestein went on to make the clear and obvious connection between the strike and the on-going, two-decades long US drone targeted killing programme which has significantly blurred the lines between law enforcement and armed conflict.
While the US alleges that the occupants of the boat were members of an organised criminal gang and President Trump and other administration officials have began to publicly talk about the threat of ‘Narco terrorists’, that in no way makes the targets of this strike combatants under the laws of war. While civilians are regularly and persistently victims of drone and air strikes, the deliberate targeting of non-combatants is still shocking.
New York University law professor Ryan Goodman, who previously worked as a lawyer in Pentagon, told the New York Times that “It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted.”
In the aftermath of the strike and questioning by the media, administration officials struggled to justify the legality of the strike, resorting to arguing that it was a matter of self-defence. Significantly, senior officials said that further such operations were likely.
Trump and the MTCR
Meanwhile, President Trump is reportedly returning to a plan formulated during his first administration to overturn controls on the export of US armed drones. Trump attempted in 2020, as we reported, to get the other state signatories of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) to accept that Predator/Reaper-type drones should be moved out of the most strongly controlled group (Category I) into the lesser group (Category II). Other states, however, gave this short shrift, much to Trumps annoyance.
According to the Reuters report, the new move involves “designating drones as aircraft… rather than missile systems” which will enable the US to then “sidestep” its treaty obligations. The move will aid US plans to sell hundreds of armed drones to Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar.
Whether this will convince other states is highly doubtful, but it is likely that Trump and his administration will not care. Such a move will of course open the flood gates for other states to unilaterally reinterpret arms control treaties in their favour in the same way and will also likely spur the proliferation of armed drones which will only further increase civilian harm.
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