A senior U.N. official said Wednesday that the U.S. should halt the CIA’s drone campaign against al-Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan, charging that the secrecy surrounding the strikes violates the legal principle of international accountability.
But a report by Philip Alston, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, stopped short of declaring the CIA program illegal.
He presented a 29-page report to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva on Wednesday that focused on so-called targeted killings by countries such as Russia and Israel as well as the United States.
“It is an essential requirement of international law that States using targeted killings demonstrate that they are complying with the various rules governing their use in situations of armed conflict,” Alston said in a news release. “The greatest challenge to this principle today comes from the program operated by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. . . . The international community does not know when and where the CIA is authorized to kill, the criteria for individuals who may be killed, how it ensures killings are legal, and what follow-up there is when civilians are illegally killed.”
George Little, a CIA spokesman, said: “Without discussing or confirming any specific action or program, this agency’s operations unfold within a framework of law and close government oversight.”
He added: “The accountability’s real, and it would be wrong for anyone to suggest otherwise.”
Alston noted that the U.S. military has a relatively public accountability process. But he observed that states are permitted to attack only civilians who directly participate in hostilities, and he argued that the military’s targeting of drug traffickers in Afghanistan is inconsistent with international humanitarian law.
He argued that it is in the interest of the United States to have clear international rules on targeted killings as more states obtain drones that are able to fire missiles.
