Targeted Killing of Khamenei and US attack on Iran’s Sovereignty:

Violation of International Law?

- DR.S.KRISHNAN, ANKIT GAJRAJ & HONEY RAJ

The United States and Israel opened their war on Iran this weekend with a sudden strike on its longtime supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameei.

While the war as a whole has been broadly denounced as illegal by critics who point to its lack of authorization from Congress or the United Nations Security Council, the ayatollah’s killing raises particular legal questions.

It is extraordinarily rare for a country to deliberately and openly kill the leader of another sovereign nation — even during legally uncontested wars. As a result, the question has rarely come up. A very rare precedent of sorts came in March 2003, when the Bush administration tried to kill Saddam Hussein on the cusp of the Iraq war, a conflict Congress had authorized — but that first strike missed its target.

Khamenei’s assassination represents a new stage in the erosion of the international norm against assassination. This norm has long been understood as part of a broader framework protecting sovereignty and prohibiting the use of force outside armed conflict. Under international law, the killing of a state official outside an armed conflict will almost invariably violate the prohibition on the use of force, state sovereignty, and/or international human rights law. The directly targeted killing of foreign adversaries, once rejected as beyond the pale, has become a prominent issue in debates over USS. security policy. The shortsighted policies driving the US's so-called “global war on terror” were undermining the norm and risked spilling over to justify the killing of state officials. In the wake of Khamenei’s assassination, this statement no longer seems to hold true.

A GRADUAL ACCEPTANCE OF ASSASSINATION