Drone strikes threaten 50 years of international law, says UN rapporteur.

(From Guardian Unlimited)

The US policy of using drone strikes to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a UN investigator has said.

Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, fears that Barack Obama's CIA-run programmes in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere will encourage other states to flout long-established international human rights law.

In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested that some attacks may constitute war crimes.

Addressing the same meeting, organised by the American …