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A UN report has concluded that the United States’s boat strike campaign against supposed drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean has violated international law and “plausibly” amounts to crimes against humanity, a label reserved for the worst human rights violations in global conflicts.

The report says that there are “reasonable grounds” to believe that the boat strikes constitute “crimes against humanity of murder” under international law because they targeted civilians, and not those classified as combatants under any formal category of international law or otherwise.

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,” the report says.

“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,” it goes on. “Murder means the unlawful killing of a person where the perpetrator intended to cause death or knew that it would occur in the ordinary course of events. The killings of 223 people are unlawful and intentional under international law.”

The report was written by Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism Ben Saul, who has previously condemned the strikes as murders.

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The U.S. has defended the strikes as lawful and conducted in “self-defense.”

But Saul has rejected that........

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