When Governments Unleash Targeted Killings

The murder last year of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in the parking lot outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, B.C., was more than just another heinous crime. It was a grim reminder to Canadians of a new reality in international relations and domestic politics.

More and more countries are turning to targeted assassinations as a legitimate way of dealing with their critics and perceived criminals and enemies.

One of the reasons is there are virtually no legal or diplomatic consequences for state actors who practise targeted killings. The best example is Saudi Arabia’s gruesome 2018 murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

The horrible crime took place in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul and was recorded on audio tape. U.S. and Turkish intelligence concluded that the death squad sent to kill Khashoggi was dispatched by the highest levels of the Saudi government.

Initially, the world was repulsed. But just a few years later, President Joe Biden was once again hobnobbing with Saudi leaders. Saudi Arabia was awarded the biggest sporting event in the world, the 2034 World Cup. And after a brief absence, investors from around the world “re-embraced” the kingdom as a good place to do business.

It remains to be seen if Canada and India will quickly return to normal relations in the wake of Nijjar’s murder. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shocked the country when he revealed that Canada had credible evidence that the government of India was involved in the Sikh activist’s killing. Nijjar was a Canadian citizen.

At the same time Nijjar was gunned down in Vancouver, federal prosecutors in the United States announced charges against a man they claimed had been “recruited” by an Indian government employee. The mission was to kill a Sikh activist and U.S. citizen in New York City.

The definition of “extrajudicial killing” is aptly chilling. According to Nils Melzer, who wrote a highly praised book on the subject, the phrase describes the state’s “premeditated selection of a person not yet in custody for elimination by force.”

Russia’s mounting toll

When most people think of targeted assassination, it conjures images out of The Godfather or Putin’s Russia: powerful thugs in mob movies, or brutal real-life dictators ordering “hits” on their rivals or critics.

There is good reason to associate the man who took over Russia in 1999 after Boris Yeltsin stepped down with targeted killings. Russia has had so many of them.

In 2003, Sergei Yushenkov, leader of the anti-Kremlin Liberal Russia party, was shot dead in front of his Moscow home. He had been pressing for an investigation into the FSB, the successor to the KGB, for its possible involvement in a series of 1999 apartment bombings that killed 300 people. The Kremlin blamed the bombings on Chechen militants, and then used that charge as a pretext to launch the Second Chechen War.

On Nov. 23, 2006, Alexander Litvinenko died in London after being poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. The former Russian security agent had fled to Britain in 2000 after accusing the FSB of plotting the murder of oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

Also in 2006, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead in her apartment after exposing human rights abuses in Chechnya by Russia.

In 2009, human rights advocate Natalya Estemirova was found with fatal bullet wounds to her head and chest hours after she was abducted from her home. She had been investigating alleged Russian abuses in Chechnya, including kidnapping and murder.

In 2015, political reformer Boris Nemtsov was shot dead. He had been a Kremlin critic who described the invasion of Ukraine as “impudent” and “harmful for Russia.”

And in 2019, a Russian gunman described by Putin as a patriot assassinated a former Chechen separatist fighter in a downtown Berlin park.

The killer rode up on his bicycle “in broad daylight” and shot his victim in the head. He received a life sentence from German authorities. But Vadim Krasikov was freed in the recent prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia, the latest example of hostage diplomacy.

The list goes on and on. Alexei Navalny, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Sergei Magnitsky and a host of others who died violently or mysteriously after getting on the wrong side of Vladimir Putin.

US drones and the rule of law

Other authoritarian leaders have followed Putin’s bloody example. Based on estimates from Amnesty International, CNN reported that between 2015 and 2017, there were 8,200 targeted killings in Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela.

According to a National Public Radio report in June 2024, there were 8,000 targeted killings in the Philippines during former president Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.

But it would be a mistake to think that such atrocities happen only in countries run by dictators.

The fact is that extrajudicial killings are part of the government’s playbook in several western countries, including the greatest democracy in the world.

What is striking about America’s targeted killing program is that it is at fundamental odds with the basis of democracy itself — the rule of law.

The basis for the rule of law is the guarantee of due process, the right of every accused person to the presumption of innocence, a public trial and a legal defence. Targeted killings transform due process into no process, a kind of state-sanctioned lynching with no judicial oversight.

In 2020, the United States assassinated Iran’s top security and intelligence commander. Qassem Suleimani died in a drone attack in Iraq at Baghdad International Airport. The extrajudicial killing was authorized by President Donald Trump.

In addition to Maj.-Gen. Suleimani, who led the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, several officials from Iraqi militias backed by Iran also died in the attack.

President Trump was not trail-blazing by approving Suleimani’s killing. In 2011, President Barack Obama authorized the assassination of the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Twenty-five members of SEAL Team Six flew into Pakistan in stealth helicopters and entered the Abbottabad compound. Nine minutes later they found and executed Osama bin Laden on the third floor of the residence.

One woman and three other men, including one of bin Laden’s sons, were also killed. Bin Laden’s corpse was put in a body bag and buried at sea by the Americans.

The entire operation was completed in 40 minutes. The real-time video of the mission was watched by the most powerful people in the U.S. government — the president, the vice-president, the secretaries of state and defence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a handful of others.

How far has America gone down the road of extrajudicial killing? Consider the case of Anwar al-Awlaki. High-level government officials determined that al-Awlaki was an al-Qaida propagandist and a member of a dangerous enemy force. He was accused of planning attacks against the United States.

In 2011, President Obama authorized his killing, which took place in Yemen. Another drone strike a few days later killed al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, said by the U.S. government to be a “bystander” who was “in the wrong place at the wrong time” during an attack on a different target.

But there was something different about this mission that brought the issue of targeted killing into the spotlight. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen.

The American Civil Liberties Union and others took the government to court, demanding to see the evidence that led the Obama administration to authorize the killing of a U.S. citizen without trial.

The government fought the release of information about the operation, but after a lengthy legal battle a federal appeals court ultimately ordered the release of a memo about al-Awlaki’s case.

The government memo justified the decision to kill al-Awlaki under anti-terrorism laws, claiming that his American citizenship did not provide a basis for disallowing the lethal action. The redacted memo did not include any of the evidence against al-Awlaki that was used to justify his assassination without trial.

The American Civil Liberties Union didn’t buy the government’s limited explanation, or its continuing attempt to shroud the practice of extrajudicial killing in secrecy.

“We will continue to press for the release of further documents relating to the targeted killing program, including other legal memos and documents related to civilian casualties.... The drone program has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, including countless innocent bystanders, but the American public knows scandalously little about who is being killed and why,” said ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer.

Pardiss Kebriaei, a lawyer with the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which also took part in the lawsuit, said the memo “proves that the government’s drone-killing program is built on gross distortions of law.”

What law of war says

The arguments supporting extrajudicial killing come down to one: in the name of national security, the state has the right to eliminate such threats without regard to due process, even when the target is an American citizen.

With important caveats, international law supports that assertion. Under international law of war, targeted killings are permitted as self-defence during an armed conflict. In that case, international human rights law can be superseded by law of war.

Even outside of war, targeted killings are sometimes lawful. But only if lethal force is used to prevent the imminent loss of human life, and when arrest is not a reasonable possibility.

On the other side of this murky issue, there are grave problems posed by the growing normalization of extrajudicial killing.

Given the example of the United States violating the sovereignty of countries it enters to conduct targeted killings, which is contrary to the UN Charter, what is to stop despotic state actors from justifying killing sprees by labelling their detractors and critics “enemy combatants”?

And what about the not-so-targeted innocent civilians who die because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time? Are their deaths murder by state actors, or merely collateral damage?

And do targeted killings actually make anyone safer? The consequences of the recent assassinations of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut suggest these killings could just as easily escalate as prevent violence.

The world has been waiting to see if events will lead to a wider regional war in the Middle East, possibly drawing in the United States, after both Iran and Hezbollah vowed to take revenge on Israel for the deaths of Haniyeh and Shukr.

Pope Francis publicly addressed the issue by denouncing attacks by both sides, “even targeted ones, and killings.... They do not help [us] to walk the path of justice, the path of peace, but generate even more hatred and revenge.”

In the battle between the rule of law and the law of the jungle, the jungle is winning.