Ben Keith Tells the IBA There Is No Basis in International Law for the US Boat Strikes

Ben Keith was quoted in the International Bar Association’s Global Insight on 13 July 2026, in a report by Ann Deslandes on the legal cases now being brought over United States military attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific. Keith, who is an officer of the IBA Criminal Law Committee and a barrister at 5 St Andrew’s Hill, put it flatly: ‘There’s no basis under international law for the boat strikes.’ The report sets out the petitions and lawsuits filed by bereaved families, and the broader question of what the word ‘narcoterrorism’ is doing to ordinary criminal law and international law.

Why the boat strikes are being litigated

Operation Southern Spear is the US military campaign, begun in autumn 2025, that has struck around sixty vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific on the stated basis that they were carrying drugs. More than 200 people have been killed. The first strike, in September 2025 off the Venezuelan coast, killed eleven.

Two cases now carry the argument. In December, the family of Alejandro Carranza Medina, a Colombian fisherman killed on 15 September, filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights alleging breaches of the rights to life, to equality before the law, to recognition of legal personality and to a fair trial and due process. The Commission heard the matter in March. Separately, relatives of Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo, two Trinidadian men killed on 14 October, have sued the US government in the federal court in Massachusetts under the Alien Tort Statute and the Death on the High Seas Act, pleading that the strikes were extrajudicial killings. In November, UN human rights experts had already warned that the attacks amounted to unlawful killings.

The legal position outside an armed conflict is not obscure. Drug smuggling is a crime, and crimes at sea are answered by interception, boarding and arrest under the law of the sea, with lethal force permitted only where it is necessary and proportionate to an immediate threat to life. Trafficking narcotics is not an armed attack. No amount of tonnage on a deck converts a criminal suspect into a lawful military target.

That is why the vocabulary matters so much. Keith describes ‘narcoterrorism’ as ‘a pseudo legal definition used by the US in which the use of law is overridden by the use of hard power’. Jonathan Hafetz, an officer of the IBA Human Rights Law Committee and a professor at Seton Hall Law School, told the IBA that the term reflects a trend in which counterterrorism logic migrates into ordinary criminal law, with grave consequences for the fundamental right to life. The word does real work. Once a man in a small boat is a narcoterrorist rather than a defendant, the arrest, the charge, the disclosure and the trial all quietly fall away.

With thanks to the International Bar Association. The full report by Ann Deslandes is available at ibanet.org.