A UN rapporteur says 223 people were killed unlawfully at sea. The same week, sanctions on the court were reported ready.

Two things were reported on Monday. Taken singly, each is a story. Taken together they describe a system, and the system is the subject of this column.

The first. A United Nations special rapporteur, Ben Saul, concluded that recent US airstrikes on vessels allegedly trafficking drugs breached international law and could constitute crimes against humanity.¹ His count, since September of last year: at least 68 US strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific, outside US territorial waters, killing more than 220 people.¹ In a briefing note released by the UN Human Rights Council on Monday, he wrote that such 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”.¹ His conclusion: “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.”¹

The second. Reuters reports that the administration has prepared sanctions against the entire International Criminal Court and plans to announce them soon, according to two sources familiar with the matter.² The court, established in 2002, prosecutes war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.²

I am going to be careful here, because the easy version of this column is also the dishonest one. Nothing I have read says the ICC has claimed jurisdiction over the boat strikes, or that the sanctions are a response to them. The United States has never been a member of the court.² The reported motives are elsewhere: US officials want the court to drop its arrest warrants against Israeli leaders and a past investigation into American troops in Afghanistan.² So this is not a lawsuit being sabotaged. It is two facts about the same government in the same week, and the connection I am drawing between them is mine, argued below, not asserted as anybody’s plan.

Start with the word the BBC reaches for throughout its account of Operation Southern Spear, which the US military launched in early September: alleged.¹

The BBC’s own summary of the state of the evidence is short: officials have not offered definitive evidence that the vessels targeted are involved in trafficking.¹ Set that beside the language Southern Command used about the most recent strike, in which the US military says it killed four people: “Confirmed intelligence revealed the vessel’s active involvement in narco-trafficking. The operation killed four narco-terrorists,” a statement accompanied by a grainy video.¹

Confirmed intelligence. Narco-terrorists. Consider what those phrases are asked to do. They deliver a verdict without a trial, issued by the party that carried out the sentence, about people who are no longer in a position to contest it. Two words in a press release take the place of the entire apparatus a society built for deciding whether a particular human being did a particular thing: charge, evidence, defence, judge. The dead cannot appeal a press release.

And notice what the rapporteur’s objection actually is, because it is narrower and harder than “this is wrong.” Saul’s point is that even if the targets could be identified as members of designated terrorist groups, they had not staged an armed attack on the United States that would trigger a right to self-defence under international law.¹ In other words: grant the label. Grant, for argument, that everyone aboard was exactly who the statement says. On the rapporteur’s reading the label still does not supply the right to kill, because what triggers self-defence is an armed attack on the United States, and he says there was none.¹

That distinction is the whole of the rule of law compressed into one sentence, and it is why 223 is the number in this piece and not 223 minus however many we would rather not think about.

A society does not keep its hands clean by having good intentions. It keeps them clean by maintaining an institution that can tell it when its hands are dirty, and by leaving that institution able to function when the answer is unwelcome. That is the only mechanism there has ever been. Everything else is a mood.

So here is the moral, and I hold it as judgment rather than as reporting. The gravest thing in these two reports is not the strikes, appalling as the rapporteur finds them. It is the pattern of treating the machinery of accountability as an adversary to be disabled. Sanction the judges. Then sanction the court. Call on other countries to leave it, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio did in July.² Each step is defensible on its own terms by somebody. The sum of them is a world in which the question “was that lawful?” has no longer got anywhere to be asked.

Look at what entity-wide sanctions would actually do, because it is unusually concrete. Any such measure by the US Treasury would prohibit US citizens and companies from providing funds, goods or services to the court without a licence from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, and banks often over-comply with US sanctions because they depend on access to the American financial system.² The court’s own registrar and president have warned what that reaches: procurement of IT services, insurance, the hiring of investigators, and everyday financial transactions such as paying dozens of American employees.²

Those are the court’s own officers describing what such sanctions could reach, and they have not reached it yet. But note the kind of pressure being prepared. It is not a legal argument to be won or lost. It is a payroll, an insurance policy and a hiring budget. A tribunal does not have to be defeated in court if the people who would staff it cannot be paid.

The conventional answer is: other governments. Look at what happened to the ones who asked.

Latin American leaders whose citizens were being targeted criticised the strikes strongly from the beginning.¹ Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader at the time, opposed them, and was seized by US forces in a night-time raid on Caracas at the start of this year.¹ Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, another outspoken critic, stood down in August after a Trump-backed candidate won June’s presidential election.¹ I am not alleging a conspiracy and the BBC does not report one; an election is an election. I am making a narrower observation, which is that the two leaders this report names as critics are both out of office, and that any third leader deciding whether to object now has that sequence in front of them.

The next answer is: the press. We published today on the White House pool going dark after three newsrooms were banned and sued.³ The rapporteur’s report exists because somebody counted, and counting 68 strikes across the Caribbean and the Pacific is reporting before it is law.

The third is: the voters. This desk has spent the week on what happens to that answer under pressure, most directly in the Kremlin wants a mandate and has arranged the answer.³ Accountability is not one institution. It is courts, press and ballots holding each other up, and each one is easier to lean on once the others are bearing less.

Meanwhile the strikes continue. The rapporteur’s report came two days after the US military said it had killed four more people on a vessel in the Caribbean.¹ The BBC has contacted the White House and the State Department for a response to the report.¹ The State Department did not immediately respond to Reuters about the court.²

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the operation is aimed at removing “narco-terrorists from our hemisphere” and securing the United States from “the drugs that are killing our people”.¹ I take that stated aim seriously, and a government indifferent to overdose deaths would deserve the contempt it got. But the claim in front of us is 68 strikes and 223 dead, outside US territorial waters, with officials having offered no definitive evidence that the vessels were involved in trafficking — and a rapporteur’s finding that there are reasonable grounds to believe those killings were crimes against humanity of murder.¹

So I will put the two Monday reports side by side one last time and let the reader draw the line or refuse to. A UN special rapporteur has counted the strikes and the dead and reached that finding.¹ Reuters reports that entity-wide sanctions against the court built to weigh findings of that kind have been prepared, with the timing unclear and nothing yet announced.² I have said plainly that nothing I opened connects the two, that nothing I opened says the court has claimed jurisdiction here, and that the United States has never been a member.² What I will say is the judgment this column was written to reach: a government sure of its own conduct has no interest in a weaker tribunal, and every government that has weakened one was sure of its own conduct at the time.