\Petition says Colombia citizen Alejandro Carranza Medina was illegally killed in US airstrike on 15 September
A family in Colombia filed a petition on Tuesday with the Washington DC-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging that the Colombian citizen Alejandro Carranza Medina was illegally killed in a US airstrike on 15 September.
The petition marks the first formal complaint over the airstrikes by the Trump administration against suspected drug boats, attacks that the White House says are justified under a novel interpretation of law.
The IACHR, part of the Organization of American States, is designed to “promote and protect human rights in the Western Hemisphere”. The US is a member, and in March the Trump administration’s state department wrote: “The United States is pleased to be a strong supporter of the IACHR and is committed to continuing support for the Commission’s work and its independence. Preserving the IACHR’s autonomy is a pillar of our human rights policy in the region.”
Justifying something — a law, for example, or the civic organization of a nation state — requires a moral standard. For example, laws against slavery can be justified by pointing to harms or rights violations (or whatever framework you have for making ethical judgements). Most people rely on their intuitions, but ethics is a formal system — a bit like mathematics, actually. Such a system has to be consistent to be meaningful (this is called the principle of explosion).
Anyway, many such normative systems have been proposed. Utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics are broad examples.
None of these contains a mechanism to justify a governing body’s criminalization of drugs.
Specifically,
Etcetera.