WOLAS Statement on the United States’ Aggression Against Venezuela and the Abduction of President Maduro
The recent military attack by the United States of America against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, culminating in large-scale strikes on Venezuelan territory and the reported abduction, transfer and indictment of Venezuela’s sitting President into United States custody, constitutes flagrant breaches of international law. Beyond the immediate violence inflicted upon Venezuelan territory and its population, this episode must be understood as systemic. It exposes structural asymmetries and colonial continuities that persist in the foundation, practice and enforcement of international law.
This assault is the culmination of a progressive course of coercive action. That trajectory includes the United States’ announcement in December of a de facto blockade of Venezuelan oil shipments, the interception-bombing of vessels, and the deployment of an unusually large United States naval and air presence in the Caribbean. It is further compounded by a contemporaneous bombing campaign of the U.S. against alleged drug-smuggling vessels in international waters, carried out outside any recognised armed conflict and widely criticised as unlawful use of force and extrajudicial killings under international law. The unlawfulness is aggravated by the attempted enforcement of unilateral sanctions through military means. An armed blockade, whatever terminology is used, is a classic act of war. Taken together, these measures constitute a pattern of international aggression aimed at subordinating Venezuela’s political independence and economic sovereignty.
From the standpoint of international law, the violations are multiple and cumulative. The use of armed force against Venezuelan territory flagrantly breaches Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and customary international law. It also implicates Article 2(1) of the Charter, which enshrines the sovereign equality of states. The extraterritorial abduction of a sitting head of state by military means on foreign territory is incompatible with sovereign equality and territorial integrity. No credible claim of self-defence under Article 51 can be sustained in relation to a large-scale bombing campaign and the extraterritorial capture of a head of state. Equally untenable is any invocation of domestic constitutional authority, executive power, or national criminal jurisdiction as a basis for international military action. International law does not permit the unilateral enforcement of domestic criminal law through armed force on foreign territory, nor the forcible projection of national jurisdiction across borders in defiance of the Charter framework.
This legal rupture was rendered explicit when President Donald Trump publicly declared that the United States would “run” Venezuela until a political transition could be arranged, thereby asserting a claim to foreign administration and control absent any mandate under international law. Such a declaration constitutes a manifest breach of the prohibition of trusteeship, violates the UN Charter, and exposes the colonial logic through which sovereignty is treated as contingent, suspendable, and subject to imperial management rather than as a non-derogable legal entitlement of peoples.
This escalation must be situated within Latin America’s longer history of interventionism, shaped by experiences of external domination, debt coercion, regime change, and military occupation. From the 1902 blockade of Venezuela to the Roosevelt Corollary, from the Platt Amendment to the invasion of Panama in 1989, the language of ‘order’, ‘security’, and ‘law enforcement’ has repeatedly masked imperial prerogative. Latin America’s international legal tradition, shaped by the Drago and Calvo doctrines and later crystallised in the Montevideo Convention, developed in response to gunboat diplomacy, debt enforcement by force, and external intervention. The present targeting of Venezuela signals an attempt to reverse those achievements and to renormalise military coercion in a region that had come, through struggle and legal development, to regard itself as a zone of peace.
The events also confirm the stratified reality of the so-called ‘rules-based international order’. That order has not operated uniformly; it has long depended on an unequal geography of violence, in which some regions are treated as permissible theatres of coercive force while others are insulated by power and privilege. Venezuela now seems positioned within the former category.
The stated and unstated rationales, including counter-narcotics enforcement, criminal prosecution, regional security, or access to strategic resources, do not justify these violations. International law does not authorise regime change by force, whether overt or pursued through economic strangulation and military intimidation, nor does it permit the unilateral externalisation of domestic criminal jurisdiction. The principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources is directly implicated when coercion is deployed against a resource-rich state under the guise of legality and used to reorder political authority.
At its core, the actions of the United States as described constitute acts of aggression, the supreme international crime under the Nuremberg Principles and subsequent international jurisprudence, which attract universal jurisdiction. Aggression, defined as the planning, preparation, initiation or execution of acts of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, is prohibited under international law and can be prosecuted universally irrespective of where the offence occurred.
The legal consequences extend beyond the immediate use of force. Any negotiation, agreement, or political arrangement conducted or purportedly consented to by an abducted head of state on behalf of Venezuela while under detention, threat, or control by a foreign military power is legally null and void. It is a fundamental principle of law that consent extracted under coercion lacks validity; a state’s will cannot be lawfully expressed through a representative acting under duress, nor can binding obligations be imposed upon its people under such conditions.
WOLAS condemns this course of conduct as an internationally wrongful act engaging state responsibility, constituting an act of aggression that undermines the prohibition of the use of force, endangering regional peace, and corroding international law. We call upon the United Nations, regional organisations, and legal practitioners worldwide to resist the normalisation of aggression framed as law enforcement. If the Charter system is to retain legal meaning, it cannot be selectively applied. The defence of justice and international law today requires confronting not only discrete breaches but also the colonial structures that render such aggression thinkable, repeatable, and tolerated. The American government must respect international law and provide the necessary reparations for its aggressive actions against the Venezuelan government, and, most importantly, must immediately release the Venezuelan president in accordance with basic principles of the standing international order.
