MADURO COULD BE RELEASED: US courts might follow a South African appeal ruling

On 3 January 2026, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was forcibly abducted by US authorities. As he faces serious drug charges in a Manhattan court, the implications of his abduction raise critical questions about international law and state immunity. The writer says he could soon be released.

On Saturday 3 January 2026, United States law-enforcement and military personnel forcibly abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife from Venezuela and took them to the United States. On Monday 5 January, the two captives were brought before the Manhattan federal district court to answer charges of importing cocaine into the United States or of manufacturing and distributing cocaine knowing or reasonably believing that it would be imported into the United States. The Maduros pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Mr Maduro said they had been unlawfully kidnapped from their home. Presiding Judge Alvin Hellerstein has adjourned the trial until 17 March. In the United States, the courts treat the manner in which a criminal defendant has been brought before the court as irrelevant to the courts’ competence to try that defendant.

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Thus in 1886, after a US agent had forcibly detained one Frederick Ker in Lima in Peru and taken him against his will to Illinois where he was tried and convicted for embezzlement, the US Supreme Court unanimously held that there was no reason to differ from authoritative prior English and US court rulings which held that forcibly detaining a suspect in another country and abducting him to the United States to be tried in a court in the United States “presents no valid objection to his trial in such court”. In the case of both abductions, that of Ker from Peru in 1886 and that of Álvarez-Machaín from Mexico in 1992, an Extradition Treaty was in force between the US and the other country concerned. But the US Supreme Court held in both cases that neither the existence of the Extradition Treaty nor its procedures governing extraditions from the one country to the other restricted the application of the principle that the accused’s forcible abduction from the other country did not prohibit his trial in a court in the United States for violations of the criminal laws of the United States.

And, while the accused’s forcible abduction from the other country may have violated general principles of the international law of nations, the US Supreme Court ruled in both the 1886Kerand 1992Álvarez-Machaíncases that this was a matter for the executive government and did not prevent the accused’s trial in a United States court for violations of the criminal laws of the United States. But three of the nine Supreme Court justices in the 1992Álvarez-Machaíncase gave a dissenting opinion. They stressed that the extradition treaty with Mexico was comprehensive and that it was shocking that a party to the treaty might believe that it had secretly reserved the right to make seizures of citizens in the other party’s territory.

It was a breach of international law for a country to send its agents to the territory of another country to apprehend persons accused of having committed a crime. The accused might have participated in an especially brutal murder of an American law enforcement agent, but that did not justify disregarding the Rule of Law, which the Supreme Court has a duty to uphold. The dissenters quoted Thomas Paine’s warning, “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” These three dissenting justices in the 1992Álvarez-MachaínUS Supreme Court case cited with approval a ruling of 1991 by the South African Supreme Court’s Appellate Division. In 1991 the South African Appellate Division ruled that a South African court had no jurisdiction to try one Ebrahim Ismail Ebrahim, a member of the African National Congress (ANC)’s armed wing uMkhonto we Sizwe who had left South Africa in 1980 but in 1986 was forcibly abducted from Swaziland (as it then was) by South African agents and brought to South Africa to stand trial for treason.

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