Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has said that the United States violated the principle of sovereignty by assassinating Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani in early January.
In an interview with Al Mayadeen, she said that Washington failed to prove that the assassination was carried out to protect U.S. interests, ISNA reported on Sunday.
Callamard said on Thursday that the U.S. targeted killing of Soleimani was unlawful and risked eroding international laws that govern the conduct of hostilities, The New York Times reported.
“Absent an actual imminent threat to life, the course of action taken by the U.S. was unlawful,” Callamard wrote in a report that she presented on Thursday to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
She said that the U.S. attack on Soleimani was the first targeted drone killing of a senior foreign government official on the territory of a third country.
“It is hard to imagine that a similar strike against a Western military leader would not be considered as an act of war,” she wrote.
As a result of the killing, the international community faced “the very real prospect that states may opt to ‘strategically’ eliminate high ranking military officials outside the context of a ‘known’ war, and seek to justify the killing on the grounds of the target’s classification as a ‘terrorist’ who posed a potential future threat,” Callamard said in her report.
On January 3, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered airstrikes that martyred General Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the second-in-command of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), in Baghdad’s international airport.
Soleimani was recognized internationally as a legendary commander in the war against terrorist groups, especially Daesh (ISIS).