UN launches probe of global use terror drone hits as legitimate warfare

A United Nations official has initiated a formal probe into assassination drone strikes and targeted killings, examining one of the most controversial instruments of US government’s so-called counter terrorism policy.

In a press briefing in British capital of London on Thursday, UN Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson announced the launching of an investigation by experts to inspect 25 terror drone attacks in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories, The Los Angeles Times reports on Friday.

The UN official further said that the assassination drones are not the only manner of conducting targeted killings, “but the relative ease with which they are used and their devastating effects have spotlighted the legal unease around them,” the report adds.

Emmerson is also cited in the report as emphasizing that the world “urgently needs ways to regulate their use and keep it in line with international law,” which has still not resolved ways to deal with such killings.

“To shine the light of factual truth on some of these very abstract debates,” a team of investigators will look into targeted killings, the UN expert is quoted as saying.

The New America Foundation has published figures, estimating that since 2004 up to 3,279 people have been killed by US assassination drone strikes in Pakistan alone, including as many as 305 civilians and hundreds of others “unknown.”

The United States under the Obama administration has intensified terror drone strikes and its officials have defended the deadly assassination bids as a warranted use of force against what they widely claim as affiliates of the shadowy al-Qaeda terrorist group.

However, the daily points out, the rising use of assassination drones as a form of warfare “has alarmed human rights groups around the world, who argue that the secretive practice of targeted killings runs afoul of international law.”

The US, it notes, has been sued over drone assassination of three American citizens in Yemen, including an alleged al-Qaeda activist and his 16-year-old son.

Additionally, the US has recently escalated its terror drone attacks across Yemen, striking the central part of the country on Wednesday for the fourth time in the previous five days.

“The Obama administration seems to have decided that wherever it conducts a targeted killing, it is by definition engaged in armed conflict, even far from any obvious battlefield,” James Ross of Human Rights Watch is quoted of saying in the report. “What would the US say if Russia or China took the same approach to attack perceived enemies in the streets of New York or Washington?”

According to Emmerson, UN investigators will gather evidence on terror drone strikes until May by visiting a number of targeted countries and would make recommendations to the world body about nation’s duty to probe such attacks.