On Friday, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said airstrikes conducted by the United States against boats in the Caribbean and Pacific were a violation of international human rights law and must cease immediately.

“Over 60 people have reportedly been killed in a continuing series of attacks carried out by US armed forces against boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since early September, in circumstances that find no justification in international law,” Türk said in a statement.

For the last two months, the US government has been conducting an illegal murder spree in international waters under the pretext of combating “narco-terrorists.” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump have presented zero evidence that any of the over 60 people killed in at least 14 strikes presented a threat to anyone in the United States or anywhere else.

In his statement, Türk said the ongoing attacks “and their mounting human cost are unacceptable.” He continued: “The US must halt such attacks and take all measures necessary to prevent the extrajudicial killing of people aboard these boats, whatever the criminal conduct alleged against them.”

The UN high commissioner noted that illicit drug trafficking is a “law-enforcement matter, governed by the careful limits on lethal force set out in international human rights law,” and that “intentional use of lethal force is only permissible as a last resort against individuals who pose an imminent threat to life.”

Türk pointed to the “very sparse information” provided the US government, and said that “none of the individuals on the targeted boats appeared to pose an imminent threat to the lives of others or otherwise justified the use of lethal armed force against them under international law.”

The strikes have taken place thousands of miles from the United States coastline. None of the boats targeted, many of which carried only a dozen people or less, are large enough to reach US shores.

The criminality of the US government is seemingly limitless. In instances where there have been survivors following missile strikes, the US government has refused to take them into custody and prosecute them for their alleged “narco-terrorism.”

The US is not a party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and has spent the last two years politically, military and economically backing the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing campaign in the West Bank.

Türk called on Washington to “adhere to international law” in “accordance with the fundamental rule of law principles of due process and fair trial, for which the US has long stood.”

In fact, the US has repeatedly violated international law. Since the creation of the United Nations following World War II, the US government, in the name of combating communism, has supported right-wing coups, fascist dictatorships and death squads around the world. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the US, in an attempt to stave off economic challengers, embarked on a global campaign of aggressive and illegal wars in South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

The US continues to lie about the strikes as it prepares regime-change operations in Venezuela and possibly Colombia. On Friday, the Miami Herald reported that the Trump administration has “made the decision to attack military installations inside Venezuela and the strikes could come at any moment.”

The Herald said the strikes would be conducted by air and could happen “in a matter of days or even hours.” The Herald’s sources refused to say whether Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was a target, but the newspaper wrote that he “is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to.”

The Herald’s reporting follows a similar article published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, reporting that the Trump administration had identified military facilities inside Venezuela that were allegedly used to smuggle drugs. The Journal said a final decision had yet to be made by Trump on which, or if any, targets would be struck.

Asked to comment on the Herald’s reporting Friday, Trump denied that a decision had been made to strike land targets inside Venezuela. However, speaking aboard the USS George Washington aircraft carrier in Japan earlier this week, he said, “Now we’ll stop the drugs coming in by land.”

As of this writing, some 10,000 US Marines and sailors are in the Southern Caribbean and Puerto Rico, including some 4,000 on the USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the US Navy.

The Trump administration has yet to go to Congress to seek a formal declaration of war or resolution authorizing use of force against Venezuela or the drug cartels allegedly in its employ. On Thursday, Senate Democrats revealed that they had been excluded from a secret military briefing the prior day in which military lawyers reportedly provided the legal justification for the boat murders.

That same day, according to the New York Times, “military legal experts” did not show up at a previously scheduled briefing for House members on the strikes. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Massachusetts) said that while some officers appeared, “They didn’t even show up with the lawyers,” and did not provide a legal rationale for the strikes.

“They just said that they can’t answer these questions because the lawyers aren’t here,” Moulton told the Times.

Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-California) told the newspaper the officers at the briefing told her that not only did the military not know the identities of those it had killed, but that “they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes.”

Jacobs said the military is not taking into custody or bringing to trial the survivors of the strikes because “they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden.”

The Democrats, who pioneered extra-judicial murder under the Obama administration, with its “Terror Tuesdays,” are incapable of and unwilling to propose any concrete action to stop the Trump administration’s war drive. If the initiative is left to the parties of the ruling class and their adjuncts in the trade union apparatus, the same military that is murdering fisherman in the Pacific and Caribbean will soon be massively deployed on the streets of America.