U.N. expert: U.S. killing of Iran general was unlawful

GENEVA — A United Nations expert investigating summary executions said Thursday that the United States’ targeted killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran was unlawful and risked eroding international laws that govern the conduct of hostilities.

Agnes Callamard, the U.N. special rapporteur investigating extrajudicial and summary executions, said the U.S. drone strike that killed Soleimani as he arrived in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in January only could be justified in international law as a response to an imminent threat.

The U.S. had provided no evidence to support that position, she said.

“Absent an actual imminent threat to life, the course of action taken by the U.S. was unlawful,” Callamard wrote in a report she presented Thursday to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The retaliatory missile attacks Iran launched against U.S. bases in Iraq five days later also were “completely outside the scope of what is permissible” in international law, Callamard said.

Callamard’s report as a U.N. independent expert is intended as an international wake-up call that will help to generate critical scrutiny and action on issues hitherto debated mainly by academics, lawyers and security experts.

There’s an urgent need for international action to monitor and regulate the use of drones and the threat they pose to international law, Callamard said.

Soleimani commanded Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a branch of the military that ran clandestine operations across the Middle East and was designated by President Donald Trump as a foreign terrorist organization in April 2019.

Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said they ordered the strike in response to an imminent threat of attack but provided no evidence in official explanations to Congress and the U.N.

In a memo to Congress, the administration said only that it carried out the strike as a response to previous Iranian attacks and “to deter Iran from conducting or supporting further attacks against United States forces and interests.”

The information that Trump administration officials provided was “remarkably vague and inconsequential as far as a possible imminent threat is concerned,” Callamard wrote in the report.