Unequal sovereignty and international law

On 3 January 2026, the United States (US) captured and detained Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, with charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation, and weapons possession. Meanwhile, President Trump stated that the US would take control of Venezuela until a new government is installed. This is one of the rarest incidents in modern history where a sitting head of state is forcibly taken off his own land by a foreign military force and subjected to criminal charges in a foreign land.

The idea that each state is entitled to manage its own affairs without outside interference is one of the oldest and cardinal principles of international law, dating back to the Westphalian Treaty of 1648. The United Nations Charter also recognises this principle in its articles 2(1) and 2(4) refraining member states from interfering in the internal affairs of another, and from threatening or using force against the territorial integrity of any other state. However, recent events in Venezuela have once again demonstrated that sovereignty is not a right evenly granted to all states but a privilege of a selective few.

The sovereignty, immunity, and non-interference rules exist on papers only. In practice, states who do not yield to the powerful ones, get sanctioned, isolated or invaded, and the Security Council turns a blind eye. The rule of sovereignty in the contemporary international order has only become prerogative of the strong.

The Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars have long argued that the international legal order was never designed to equally protect weaker states. Thus, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in the Nicaragua v United States of America (1986) case, ruled against the US for its breach of customary international law obligation pertaining to not using force against another state, which they did by assisting the Contra rebels, the US blocked the enforcement of the court decision by exercising its veto power. When any of the five states with veto powers is a party to a dispute, the Council is effectively paralysed. Similarly, in 2019, the US had simply declared the Venezuelan government headed by Nicolas Maduro an illegitimate one without passing any UN Resolution. Instead, the US and the United Kingdom (UK) recognised the rival leader Juan Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela. Moreover, the UK Supreme Court, in December 2021, ruled that Britain’s recognition of Guaidó was clear and unequivocal, and thereby approving Guaidó’s board to control the Venezuelan assets held in the Bank of England.

However, what makes the recent arrest of Maduro particularly worrying is the wholesale disregard of a well-established rule of customary international law, namely immunity ratione personae. According to this doctrine, a sitting head of state is granted absolute immunity from the criminal jurisdiction of foreign courts, as well as personal inviolability, i.e.., immunity from any measure of physical constraint. It is a binding rule of international law affirmed by the ICJ in the landmark Arrest Warrant case, where the Court decided that the heads of state, the heads of government and the foreign ministers have complete immunity against foreign criminal prosecutions, irrespective of the seriousness of the alleged offences.

It is true that some argue that there are a few exceptions to this rule of immunirty for the most serious crimes, ie, jus cogens violations. However, Maduro’s alleged offences of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking clearly do not meet this threshold. Unsurprisingly, the western governments and the vast majority of the allied states opted to keep quiet on this gross violation of international law. Again, the UN Security Council was supposed to prevent this kind of intervention. But it failed to do so due to its structural limitation, namely: veto power. On the other hand, the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has also been abusively used to find justifications for such interventions. The doctrine was initially endorsed by UN member states in 2005, aiming to prevent mass atrocities where a state has unreasonably failed to protect its citizens.

The latest turn of events in Iran further exemplifies this tendency. On 28 February 2026, the US and Israeli forces jointly attacked Tehran and killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. In the aftermath, President Trump publicly asserted that Iran’s new supreme leader would not last long without US approval. Needless to say, such a pronouncement is prima facie inconsistent with international law as no provision of international law confers upon any State the authority to approve, veto, or otherwise determine the political leadership of another sovereign State. And yet the statement was made openly, without legal justification.

Taken together, the sanctions regime in Venezuela, the arrest of an incumbent president, and open political pressure on leadership succession in Iran tell a coherent story that TWAIL scholars have long been narrating. The sovereignty, immunity, and non-interference rules exist on papers only. In practice, states who do not yield to the powerful ones, get sanctioned, isolated or invaded, and the Security Council turns a blind eye. The rule of sovereignty in the contemporary international order has only become prerogative of the strong.

The writer is student of law at the University of Dhaka.