By abducting the president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, through a military operation with no justification under international law to bring them to a New York court on Monday, January 5, the US president Donald Trump has bypassed deliberately global norms and the International Criminal Court (ICC). He thus gives priority to a narrow narcotics bust over a holistic, victim-focused potential reckoning for alleged crimes against humanity.
In October 2025, the ICC Office of the prosecutor declared that Venezuela had made “no meaningful progress” in its own domestic investigations and that it would close its Caracas office, signalling a shift towards international warrants. This was followed on 11 December by the country’s National Assembly vote to withdraw from the Rome Statute, which Venezuela ratified in 2000. There is a possibility that a sealed ICC warrant may already exist for Maduro for crimes against humanity. If this turns out to be the case, it would place the Trump administration – which is sanctioning ICC judges – in the position of holding a high-value defendant and blocking his surrender for the mass atrocities that define his regime’s legacy. The Venezuelan people will keep waiting for justice, that may now not come at all.
During the arraignment, Maduro pleaded not guilty to the charges of narco-terrorism, cocaine importation and the possession of machine guns. The counsel, for his visibly bruised and injured wife, requested an X-ray for suspected fractured ribs sustained during the military abduction. Despite the defence challenging the legality of the capture, the court proceeded under the US Ker-Frisbie doctrine, treating the indisputable illegality of the kidnapping as disturbingly irrelevant to its domestic jurisdiction.
The Ker-Frisbie doctrine
US domestic law can use the Ker-Frisbie doctrine, a 19th-century precedent initially established in 1886 to allow the kidnapping and the trial in Illinois of larcenist Frederick Ker, who had fled to Peru. It asserts that the power of a court to try a person is not impaired by the fact that they were brought within the court’s jurisdiction via “forcible abduction”. This was significantly reaffirmed in 1992 when the US Supreme Court held that the abduction of a Mexican national did not violate extradition treaties. The only significant limit to this doctrine stems from the 1974 case against Francisco Toscanino, convicted of drug conspiracy, whose conviction was declared invalid because American agents kidnapped and tortured him from Uruguay to bring him to the US, violating his constitutional rights and international law.
Here, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals – the same circuit overseeing Maduro’s case – suggested that a court could divest itself of jurisdiction if the government’s conduct “shocks the conscience”. This exception typically requires proof of torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment during the abduction – and one might consider in the present case that the injuries to Flores may yet force the court to consider whether it meets that high bar.
By applying the Ker-Frisbie doctrine to a head of state, the US continues to operate in contrast to the evolving norms of the global rule of law and the UN Charter. Most legal systems, and the UN Charter itself, view extrajudicial rendition as a violation of state sovereignty and of the right to due process. Furthermore, under customary international law, sitting heads of state have absolute immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of foreign nations. Maduro’s lawyer, Barry J. Pollack, has signalled that his client “is head of a sovereign state and entitled to the privilege” that this legal status ensures.
The UN Charter among the casualties
Just three miles north of the courthouse, the UN Security Council convened an emergency meeting on Monday to address the legality of the US operation which deployed over 150 aircraft as part of the strike on January 3, 2026 in a clear act of aggression, bypassing both Congressional authorisation and UN mandates. Preliminary reports suggest around 75 people were killed in the attack, including civilians and members of Maduro’s security team, with the overwhelming majority of UN delegates expressing alarm at the unilateralist action and precedent set – although European representatives were disappointingly quieter here.
As the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, warned on Monday, the US intervention “damages the architecture of international security, making every country less safe.” Türk wrote how rights are being “instrumentalised”, invoked to justify a breach of international law and breach of the UN Charter, but sidelined when they don’t serve the narrow interests of a narcotics bust or the “exploitation of fossil fuels.” It may seem an obvious point, but accountability for human rights violations will not be achieved through unilateral military intervention that violates international law and causes further instability.
Another immediate casualty is article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which once prohibited the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of any state, although the 2003 Iraq invasion showed how manipulated this principle could be. Professor Oona Hathaway and other international legal scholars have set out how the legal basis for this most recent US operation is non-existent. By asserting that drug trafficking can override the Charter’s prohibition on war, the Trump administration is setting a dangerous expansion of the right to self-defence, which requires an “armed attack” as a threshold that narcotics smuggling has never met.
It is a grim irony therefore, that the illegality of the US strikes and abduction qualifies as a crime of aggression, which was added to the ICC Rome Statute in 2010 and became effective in July 2018. But neither the US nor Venezuela has signed up to this. The ICC is barred from exercising jurisdiction over the crime of aggression when committed by a non-State Party’s nationals or on its territory. Unless the UN Security Council refers the situation – a move subject to a US veto – there is no legal mechanism to hold the US accountable today for what Nuremberg deemed the supreme international crime, eighty years ago.
More aggression may still be to come. The attack on Venezuela followed a meeting between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, and Israeli political leaders have explicitly framed US intervention in Venezuela as a warning to Iran.
“It’s not enough, but it’s something”
Outside the US court, the legal technicalities felt worlds away from the lived reality of the Venezuelan diaspora. Life is not black and white, and for many Venezuelans who have suffered under Maduro’s regime, Monday represented a long-awaited reckoning.
Pedro Reyes, 39, still carries the scars of the violently repressed 2014 protests. He described a police state that almost tore his daughter from him. “I never saw [the others detained with me] again,” he said. For Pedro and his friend Javier, 38, who have both called New York home for the past six years, the sight of Maduro in a Manhattan court was a moment of profound, if conflicted, relief. When asked about the US prioritising drug charges over the crimes they witnessed, the response was one of desperate pragmatism. “It’s not enough,” Javier said. “But it’s something.”
This sentiment was echoed by Naomi Zambrano, 33, who stood nearby with her baby son. Her assessment was also clear – “Maduro is a killer.” Yet, for Naomi, the day was defined by ‘incertidumbre’ (uncertainty) and she fears a future where global powers like China, Russia and Iran might be drawn into a regional conflagration following the intervention. “I have concern for that,” she added, worrying that her country would be treated as a mini-America by an administration that fundamentally misunderstands the local context.
Further down the protest line, Michael Carter of Common Defense, a grassroots organisation of US veterans and military families seeking to “defend the Constitution, oppose Forever Wars, and fight for a democracy where liberty and justice truly exist for all” was also concerned. “If the US has the authority to kidnap Maduro,” Carter asked, “why doesn’t the European Union have the authority to kidnap Trump and bring him to The Hague?” Next to him, Sean Bogue viewed the proceedings as a “transparent, bullying” pretext, drawing a connection with the false pretences of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to the drugs as pretext in Venezuela. “We’ve seen the bodies, the deaths and destruction we cause by pretending to be liberators,” he said. “I think this could potentially even get worse for the people of Venezuela.”
What now for transitional justice?
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Monday’s hearing is what was not in the indictment. The charges focus on the logistical flow of cocaine onto American streets and do not address the systemic persecution that has defined the Maduro era, and which in September 2018 prompted six states – Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay and Peru – to jointly refer the situation to the ICC. In 2021, ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan announced that a preliminary examination had been concluded with a decision to proceed with investigations and opening an office in Caracas, which has since been closed.
By prioritising a narco-terrorism indictment through the military strategy of an occupying force, the US has sidelined these investigations into the regime’s most heinous alleged domestic crimes. For the victims of the Maduro era, a meaningful justice must require more than a drug conviction in Manhattan, but rather it should be a process that belongs to them. It remains to be seen whether the violence Pedro faced will be addressed in the months to follow, or whether in the place of justice, 2026 marks the latest era of gunboat diplomacy.
Alannah Travers is a PhD student at Queen’s University Belfast School of Law, in collaboration with the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights, researching Algorithmic Warfare and Civilian Harm. She was previously based in Iraq, working with the Coalition for Just Reparations (C4JR) on the implementation of Iraq’s 2021 Yazidi Survivors’ Law and the closure of UNITAD. As a journalist and researcher, Alannah was awarded the Fetisov Journalism award in Excellence in Environmental Journalism for her reporting on gas flaring and is the Silver winner of the United Nations Correspondents Association 2023 Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize.
