A senior United Nations official has unveiled a report calling on the Obama administration to halt or scale back CIA drone strikes on alleged militant suspects in Pakistan. In a briefing to the UN Human Rights Council, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, stopped short of declaring the drone strikes in violation of international law. But Alston said the drone strikes are undermining the “principle of international accountability.”

UN Rapporteur Philip Alston: “Because this program remains shrouded in official secrecy, the international community does not know when and where the CIA is authorized to kill, the criteria for individuals who may be killed, how it ensures killings are legal, and what follow-up there is when civilians are illegally killed. In a situation in which there is no disclosure of who has been killed, for what reason, and whether innocent civilians have died, the legal principle of international accountability is, by definition, comprehensively violated.”