Human Rights

A United Nations fact-finding mission has concluded that “there are no indicators of structural reforms or change” to improve the human rights situation in Venezuela, despite the removal of its leader in January.

On Thursday, a member of the fact-finding mission, Maria Eloisa Quintero, delivered remarks (PDF) to the UN Human Rights Council questioning whether Venezuela’s leadership would face accountability for its record of human rights abuses.

She also pointed to ongoing abuses under the government of interim President Delcy Rodriguez, who was sworn into office on January 5.

“Civic and democratic space remains severely restricted. Civil society organizations, the few remaining independent media outlets, and political actors continue to face attacks, harassment or intimidation,” Quintero wrote in her statement.

“The prospects for full guarantees necessary for free and democratic elections remain remote.”

All told, the fact-finding mission found that at least 87 people have been detained since January.

Fourteen of them were journalists who were temporarily taken into custody while covering Rodriguez’s inauguration, and another 27 were reportedly arrested for celebrating the fall of Rodriguez’s predecessor, Nicolas Maduro.

The fact-finding mission revealed that at least 15 of the recent arrests involved children.

A violation of international law

Its report was one of the first international assessments of human rights under Rodriguez’s nascent presidency.

She took office after the United States launched a military operation in the early morning hours of January 3 to abduct Venezuela’s then-President Maduro. Previously, Rodriguez had served as Maduro’s vice president.

Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores currently remain imprisoned in New York, where they face charges of drug trafficking and weapons possession.

The US has backed Rodriguez’s ascent to the presidency. Both her government and that of US President Donald Trump have said there is no immediate plan to hold a new election in Venezuela, citing the need for stability.

Quintero emphasised that it was the view of the fact-finding mission that the US operation “violated international law”, echoing the legal consensus.

“While the Mission has reasonable grounds to believe that Nicolas Maduro is responsible for crimes against humanity committed against the civilian population, this does not justify an unlawful military intervention,” Quintero wrote.

Her remarks also pointed out that, while Maduro may be gone, the rest of his government remains.

That government has faced repeated accusations that it perpetrated violence against members of Venezuela’s political opposition and others deemed critical of the country’s socialist leadership.

“The legal instruments that have long served as a basis for political persecution remain fully in force,” Quintero said.

“State institutions that played a key role in the repression — and which have been identified in previous Mission reports — have not been reviewed or reformed.”

Human rights groups have collected thousands of reports of arbitrary detention, as well as torture and extrajudicial killings, under Maduro, who served as president from 2013 until January.

Members of Venezuela’s opposition have also called for the removal of the existing government, which they say fraudulently claimed victory in the 2024 presidential race, despite vote tallies indicating otherwise.

Limits to ‘positive’ steps

At first, Quintero said the fact-finding mission found that developments under Rodriguez “initially appeared encouraging”.

She pointed to “positive” steps like the release of political prisoners and passage of an amnesty law that would lift criminal penalties for dissidents facing certain criminal charges.

But the benefits of those steps, she said, were mitigated by irregularities. The amnesty law was narrow in scope — only addressing certain accusations, made within a specific time range — and the bill never received a full, public reading.

Meanwhile, the government has claimed to release more political prisoners than has actually been verified by local human rights groups.

Quintero added that the fact-finding mission also found that 30 officials from Venezuela’s Scientific, Criminal and Forensic Investigations Corps (CICPC) — part of the national police agency — were detained for failing to produce false evidence about the US’s attack on January 3.

Their family members, she indicated, also faced government retaliation. The fact-finding mission called for more changes to be made to address the continued human rights abuses.

“A far deeper and more enduring transformation is required so that the population can trust that the long years of repression and violence have truly come to an end,” Quintero wrote.

Instead, she warned that the existing “machinery” of repression is simply “mutating” to adapt to the new reality in Venezuela, post-Maduro.

Washington, DC – In September, the United States began launching dozens of deadly military strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific.

Nearly half a year later, remarkably little is known about the strikes. The identities of the nearly 157 people killed have not been released. Any purported evidence against them has not been made public.

But a group of United Nations and international law experts are hoping to change that on Friday, when they testify at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

The international hearing will be the first of its kind since the strikes began on September 2, and rights advocates hope it can help lead to accountability as individual legal cases related to the strikes proceed.

Steven Watt, a senior staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union’s human rights programme, said the goal of the hearing will be threefold.

“Our ask will be to conduct a fact-finding investigation into what’s going on,” Watt said.

The second aim, he continued, would be “to assert or to arrive at a conclusion that there is no armed conflict here”, in what would be a rebuke to US President Donald Trump’s previous claims.

Finally, Watt said, he hopes the proceedings will yield long-sought transparency from the Trump administration on “whether or not they have a legal justification for these boat strikes”.

“We don’t think there are any,” Watt added.

‘We don’t know the names’

The experts set to testify at Friday’s hearing said the IACHR has a unique mandate to uncover the truth behind the US strikes.

The commission, based in Guatemala City, Guatemala, is an independent investigative body within the Organization of American States, of which the US was a founding member in 1948.

While the Trump administration has claimed it has a right to carry out the deadly attacks as part of a wider military offensive against so-called “narco-terrorists”, rights groups have decried the campaign as a series of extrajudicial killings.

They argue that Trump’s deadly tactics deny those targeted of anything that approaches due process.

Legal experts have also dismissed Trump’s claims that suspects in drug-related crimes are equivalent to “unlawful combatants” in an “armed conflict”.

Few details have emerged from the air strikes. Several families have come forward, however, to informally identify the dead as their loved ones.

Victims are said to include 26-year-old Chad Joseph and 41-year-old Rishi Samaroo, who were sailing home to Trinidad and Tobago when they were killed in October, according to relatives.

A complaint filed against the US government said both men travelled often between the islands and Venezuela, where Joseph found work as a farmer and fisherman, and Samaroo laboured on a farm.

The family of Colombian national Alejandro Carranza, 42, have also said he was killed in September when the US military attacked his fishing boat off the country’s coast.

The US has yet to confirm the victims’ identities, and only two survivors have ever been rescued in the 45 reported strikes.

A clearer picture of what happened will be a significant step towards accountability, according to experts like Watt.

“[The IACHR] is uniquely positioned to identify who all these persons are,” Watt said. “We just know the numbers from the United States. We don’t know the names or the backgrounds of these people.”

The IACHR has launched a range of human rights investigations in recent decades, including probes into the 2014 mass kidnapping of 43 students in Iguala, Mexico, and a series of murders in Colombia from 1988 to 1991 dubbed the Massacre of Trujillo.

The commission has also examined US policies, including extrajudicial detentions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during its so-called “global war on terror”.

The IACHR has the power to seek resolutions to human rights complaints or refer them for litigation before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Just last week, the court ordered Peru to pay reparations to the family of a woman who died during a government-led forced sterilisation campaign in the 1990s.

The Carranza family has filed its own complaint to the IACHR, and the families of Joseph and Samaroo have also lodged a lawsuit against the US in a federal court in Massachusetts.

Angelo Guisado, a senior staff lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), said a fuller accounting of the US actions is needed to prevent future abuses. He is among the experts testifying on Friday.

“You can’t normalise assassinating fishermen off the coast of South America,” Guisado told Al Jazeera. “That’s just sadistic and an abomination to the rules-based order that we’ve created.”

“So we hope that the commission can do some investigation.”

A war against ‘narco-terrorists’?

One of Guisado’s goals for Friday’s hearing will be to unpack the Trump administration’s argument that the attacks are necessary from a national security standpoint.

Even before the US strikes began, the Trump administration began framing the Latin American drug trade as an existential threat to the US.

As part of that re-framing, the administration borrowed messaging from its “global war on terror”, taking the unorthodox approach of labelling several cartels “foreign terrorist organisations”.

Speaking last week at a meeting of Latin American leaders, White House security adviser Stephen Miller maintained there is no “criminal justice solution” to drug cartels.

Instead, he affirmed that the US would use “hard power, military power, lethal force, to protect and defend the American homeland”, even if that meant carrying out deadly operations throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Guisado, however, noted that the administration has admitted that the targeted boats were largely carrying cocaine, not the highly addictive fentanyl responsible for the majority of US drug overdoses.

He explained that the administration has done little to prove its claims that drug traffickers are part of a coordinated effort to destabilise the US.

Such hyperbolic language, Guisado added, could be used as a smokescreen to conceal illegal actions.

“When you invoke national security interest, it seems as if scrutiny and any legitimate analysis or condemnation gets pushed to one side in favour of an ersatz martial law,” Guisado said.

“The idea that you could just proclaim anyone a narcoterrorist and do whatever you want with them is just so repugnant to our system of fairness, justice and law.”

Watt, meanwhile, said he hopes the IACHR will draw a clear “line in the sand”, separating drug crimes from what is conventionally considered an armed conflict.

He also would like to see the IACHR clearly outline the US’s human rights obligations.

“But even if there was an armed conflict — of which there isn’t — the laws of war would prohibit the type of conduct that the United States is engaging in here,” Watt explained.

“It would be an extrajudicial killing. It would be a war crime.”

Transparency or accountability

Friday’s hearing will only be an initial step towards accountability, and critics question how effective the IACHR will ultimately be.

The US has regularly shrugged off human rights probes at international forums, and it is not party to entities like the International Criminal Court in The Hague, raising barriers to the pursuit of justice.

Despite being a member of the OAS, the US has also not ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, one of the organisation’s founding documents.

It is, therefore, unclear how binding any IACHR decisions could be, although Watt argued that it is “longstanding jurisprudence of the commission that the declaration imposes obligations on non-ratifying member states”.

Still, legal experts said Friday’s hearing may yield clarity on the Trump administration’s legal argument for the boat strikes.

The IACHR has said US government representatives are set to appear at the hearing.

To date, the US Department of Justice has not released the Office of Legal Counsel’s official reasoning for the boat strikes, considered the foundational legal document for the military actions.

A separate memorandum from that office addressed the US abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 3, which it framed as a drug enforcement action.

That memo touched on the boat strikes, but it only served to raise further questions about Trump’s rationale.

“This will be an opportunity for the United States to put its case before the commission,” Watt said.

“But of course, it depends on US cooperation,” he continued. “They’re going down there, but it’ll be interesting to see what they actually say”.

United Nations refugee agency says forced displacement likely to increase as US and Israel continue deadly strikes across Iran.

More than three million people have been displaced in Iran since the United States and Israel launched a war against the country late last month, the United Nations says, as concerns mount over a worsening humanitarian crisis.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Thursday that as many as 3.2 million people – representing between 600,000 and one million Iranian households – have been forcibly displaced since the war began on February 28.

“Most of them are reportedly fleeing from Tehran and other major urban areas towards the north of the country and rural areas to seek safety,” UNHCR official Ayaki Ito said in a statement.

“This figure is likely to continue rising as hostilities persist, marking a worrying escalation in humanitarian needs.”

The US and Israeli militaries have continued to bombard Iran despite mounting international condemnation and calls for de-escalation.

More than 1,300 people have been killed in US-Israeli attacks across the country to date, according to the latest figures from Iranian officials.

While the US and Israel have said they are targeting Iranian leaders as well as military and nuclear infrastructure, Iran says thousands of civilian sites, such as schools and hospitals, have been attacked.

Iran’s Deputy Health Minister Ali Jafarian told Al Jazeera on Thursday that medical teams have been responding to a growing number of casualties as strikes on urban areas have intensified in recent days.

“Most of these people are civilians,” Jafarian said, adding that more than 30 hospitals and health facilities have been damaged due to the attacks.

On Thursday, explosions were heard in several parts of the capital, Tehran, and other Iranian cities as the strikes continued.

Al Jazeera’s Tohid Asadi said rescuers were digging through mounds of rubble as several multistorey apartment buildings were heavily damaged in recent attacks on a hard-hit eastern neighbourhood of Tehran.

“We saw bodies taken out [of the rubble] … and the situation was far beyond what I can call disastrous,” Asadi said.

Iran has responded to the US-Israeli assault by launching a barrage of missiles and drones at US bases and other sites in countries across the wider Middle East region.

It has also shut down the Strait of Hormuz, a critical Gulf waterway through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil transits, raising serious concerns of disruptions to global energy supplies.