Earlier this month, Reed Brody—an international war crimes prosecutor and member of the International Commission of Jurists—sat down with the BBC to discuss the legal issues that have been raised by the US strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

BBC: Reed Brody, thank you very much for joining us. As you are a war crimes prosecutor, I should ask you, first of all, are these war crimes?

Well, they’re crimes. If this were a war, these strikes could be war crimes. Killing civilians who are not participating in combat is the definition of a war crime. But in fact we’re not at war, these boat strikes are not lawful in the first place. The crime that has been committed here is premeditated murder on the high seas, and in international law that’s called an extrajudicial execution.

President Trump has taken a metaphor—the war on drugs—and tried to convert it into an actual war. But it’s not a war, any more than a war on cancer would allow you to bomb a cigarette factory or a war on disinformation would allow Trump to bomb the BBC.

The US has made drug smuggling a crime. We can and we do interdict boats that are bringing drugs into the United States, we can arrest people, bring them to the US, and if they’re convicted by a jury they’d be sentenced to jail.

What we do not have any legal authority to do is just to execute people from the skies without any evidence, without any trial, without any showing that they pose any sort of imminent danger to anybody. We can’t do that on the high seas any more than we could do it in New York.

BBC: So those involved in these strikes which result in people dying at sea, what sort of legal process could they face?

Let’s remember that the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, is right now facing trial in The Hague at the International Criminal Court for doing exactly the same thing that president Trump and Secretary Hegseth have done here, murdering suspected drug dealers without trial.

If it’s a war, it’s a war crime. If it’s not a war—which it isn’t—these are extrajudicial killings. If we had that possibility in the United States, Trump and Hegseth and the others could be brought up on murder charges. Of course, the US is not a party to the ICC treaty, but if these killings took place within the waters of Venezuela or Colombia or an ICC party, the prosecutor would be well within his rights to bring charges against U.S. officials.

BBC: What other measures should in your view the United States be using to tackle drug smuggling?

Let’s remember that this has really nothing to do with combating illegal drugs. Venezuela accounts for a very small fraction of the flow of drugs reaching the US. President Trump has justified the operation as essential to combating fentanyl, but fentanyl primarily enters the United States overland from Mexico, not via small boats from Venezuela.

And let’s remember that last week Trump pardoned the former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year sentence in a US jail for running a network that brought in 500 tons of cocaine into the United States. A man who once bragged that he was going to send coke up the nose of gringos, who received a $1 million bribe from El Chapo.

This whole situation is about bullying and threatening the regime of Nicolas Maduro, not about drugs.

BBC: Reed Brody, international war crimes prosecutor, fascinating to talk to you, thank you for your time.