Venezuela's Maduro tells US court 'I am still president' as he pleads not guilty to drugs charges

 Venezuela's Maduro tells US court 'I am still president' as he pleads not guilty to drugs charges

Venezuela's Maduro tells US court 'I'm still president' as he pleads not guilty to drug charges. Did the US military just kidnap Nicolas Maduro? US President Donald Trump says

The. The US military has arrested President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. Maduro said they were kidnapped from their home because the word is illegal in Caracas.

Maybe a more neutral way to describe Maduro's arrest is an abduction, but the US government calls it an arrest. This is largely a law enforcement action. This was the arrest of two criminals in the US justice system.

And to be clear, this is not a trivial question about semantics. This is a question about the law and whether the US has the legal right to remove world leaders from their homes, and whether other countries have the same right. Let me explain.

The worst of crimes

If you feel something about a country that unilaterally claims the right to waltz into another and then includes its leader,

Then perhaps it is because your perspective is grounded in international law. Article 2, subsection 4 of the UN Charter is quite clear.

All members shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Okay, so the UN, whose membership includes the United States, Venezuela, and almost every other country on Earth,

forbids its members from violating each other’s sovereignty. World War III was supposed to be a total ban on the use of armed force to resolve disputes between states.

At the Nuremberg trials after World War II, it was actually an American prosecutor who argued that the crime of aggression, by one state against another,

was the highest international crime. That launching a war of aggression had the moral qualities of the worst crimes. This is not to say that the United States is starting a war here.

Or that even if it were, there are no exceptions that would allow it. Only two cases would be the exercise of the right of self-defense. The other is

The Security Council has decided on a threat to international peace and security or an actual or imagined threat to the peace.

But the point here is that the United States certainly did not have Venezuela’s consent to kidnap its leader. It did not even have the authorization of the UN Security Council.

Self-defense, that’s more difficult. To use it, you have to be the target of an armed attack, and your use of force must be necessary and proportionate.

But the United States has made various efforts over the past 20 years to broaden the scope of its defense. Venezuela is not a transit point for drugs coming into the United States.

Venezuela accounts for about 5% of the cocaine trafficking trade, but most of it goes to Europe. Therefore, the justification for the war on drugs as a kind of self-defense is nonexistent.

Or painfully thin. The US has argued that Nicolas Maduro is the head of a sub-terrorism operation and that the illegal drugs being spread through Venezuela amount to a weapon.

Weapon of mass destruction. Weapon of mass destruction. We are first classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.

This could be the beginning of a self-defense argument that the violation of Venezuela’s borders, the alleged killing of at least 40 people, and the capture of the Venezuelan president are merely a preemptive strike on American lives.

And what may be fueling this defense is that Venezuelan troops allegedly fired back, which seems to touch on perhaps the most important legal argument, at least for the United States,

that the domestic legal justification for self-defense and pursuing Maduro, even beyond international borders, trumps all else.

The full wrath of American justice.

Part of what makes the legality of Maduro’s arrest so confusing is that we’re really talking about two kinds of law. There’s international law.

And then there’s U.S. domestic law. It was very gratifying to hear Secretary of State Marco Rubio say this in an interview with ABC News. Let me ask it again.

What legal authority does the United States have to run Venezuela? Well, I’ve told you what our objectives are and how we’re going to leverage them to do that.

And as far as our legal authority on quarantine goes, I’m very simple. We have court orders. These are approved boats, and we get orders from the courts to seize.

And seize these contraband. The other thing is that I don’t know whether a court order is a legal authority. Simply put, U.S. law is what

Gives U.S. law the right to do what it does, which is to arrest people. And a year-long legal case has been built against Nicolas Maduro.

As we can see in this brand new unsealed indictment, he faces four counts.

Along with charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism and import cocaine into the United States

Along with two counts of possessing machine guns and destructive devices. The indictment accuses Majuro of collaborating with some of the world’s most violent and large-scale drug traffickers and

Narcotics terrorists. That he allowed corruption to flourish in cocaine for his own benefit. That he and his inner circle provided cover and logistical support to law enforcement agencies to transport cocaine through Venezuela.

And that his wife ordered the kidnappings, beatings, and murders of people who provided him with drug money or otherwise undermined his drug trafficking operations.

The U.S. government considers Maduro a fugitive from U.S. justice. His capture was $25 million under the Biden administration and then doubled to $50 million under Trump.

And there is precedent for the U.S. military helping to carry out such arrests abroad. Thousands of U.S. troops are in key positions in Panama after an early morning raid to oust dictator General Noriega.

The dictator then running the country, General Manuel Noriega, was indicted in the United States on drug-related charges. Eventually, he was brought to the United States and tried.

And convicted, spending decades behind bars. And until the U.S. invasion, which set this whole chain of events in motion, the legal opinion within the U.S. Department of Justice

Was whether international law prohibited the U.S. president from authorizing abduction by force. In conclusion, we do not believe that it does and that the text of Article 2, Subsection 4 of the U.N. Charter does not prohibit extraterritorial law enforcement activities. So this is not a war, the United States said then and may very well say now.

It is just an arrest. At the end of the day, the argument the Trump administration makes is that it is following its own set of rules and that international law does not apply here.

But even if that were the case, consider the case of General Noriega of Panama. After the US invasion, the UN General Assembly condemned him by a vote of 75 to 20

And violated international law. The sovereignty and territorial integrity of states. The majority of the UN Security Council also condemns it.

But where did that resolution go? It was vetoed by the United States, which has that authority as a permanent member. So, thinking beyond this one operation in Venezuela, we will run the country until we can have a safe, orderly, and just transition. 

The question really is, how legal is the repression? And for those other world leaders who are watching and following Trump's example, what's stopping them from asking?