For starters, international law has never been only about punishing villains. It has also been
about maintaining order among states that do not trust one another.
The United States’ seizure of Nicolás Maduro and his transfer to New York is not a hard case morally. It is a hard case legally. The basic public account points to an armed operation on Venezuelan territory, followed by an imminent domestic prosecution in a US court, and then a presidential claim that the United States will “run” Venezuela for a period. Taken together, those facts describe something far more consequential than an arrest.
For starters, international law has never been only about punishing villains. It has also been about maintaining order among states that do not trust one another. When a powerful state enforces criminal accountability by force, without consent and outside any collective mandate, the claim is not simply that justice is being done. The claim is that power may choose the forum, the timing, and the method. That should trouble anyone who cares about accountability as law rather than as triumph. This is because the UN Charter prohibits the use of force except in narrow circumstances, principally Security Council authorization or self-defense against an armed attack. A criminal indictment does not create a right to cross borders, seize a suspect, and extract him by force. Existing legal commentary makes the point clearly. Drug trafficking and organized violence, however serious, do not automatically satisfy the threshold that would justify military force as self-defense.
Where, then, does universal jurisdiction fit. Not easily. Universal jurisdiction permits prosecution of certain exceptional crimes regardless of where they were committed, because of a shared interest in their repression. It is strongest where treaties require prosecution or extradition, or where custom has accepted universality for a very limited category of offences. What it has never been is a license to conduct armed enforcement on foreign soil. Universal jurisdiction concerns the right to prescribe and adjudicate. It does not create a roaming power of arrest. Additionally, even if one tried to force this episode into the universal jurisdiction frame, immunities intervene. The International Court of Justice has made clear that certain senior officials enjoy immunity from foreign criminal jurisdiction while in office, even where allegations are grave and even where another state asserts broad jurisdiction. This is not moral absolution. It is a structural rule designed to prevent interstate coercion through courts and police. A sitting head of state sits at the very center of that protection. The debate in relation to article 27 of the Rome Statute and its invalidation of immunity for heads of states concerns indictment for core international crimes for which the ICC has jurisdiction and to which the alleged Maduro conducts do not fit.
The Pinochet precedent is often invoked to argue that impunity can be pierced. Sometimes it can. But Pinochet was a former head of state, and the legal opening rested heavily on torture and treaty obligations, not on a general right to capture incumbents. Universal jurisdiction has always carried limits, conditions, and a deep unease about becoming a tool of political control. The reported US charges rest on domestic criminal counts related to drugs, terrorism, and weapons, anchored in an indictment in New York. That may ground prosecution if custody is lawfully obtained. It does not, by itself, supply an international legal basis to override sovereignty by force. The more this is framed as ordinary law enforcement, the harder it becomes to justify the use of force under international law.
This is where complementarity comes back into focus, not as an ICC slogan, but as an ordering principle. Under the Rome Statute, domestic systems have priority. International jurisdiction is residual, triggered only when states are unwilling or unable genuinely to act. Complementarity was meant to restrain haste and limit forum-shopping. It sought to channel outrage into sequence. Regional complementarity was meant to extend that discipline. By inserting a middle layer, it promised proximity, political ownership, and legitimacy. In Africa, this ambition has taken institutional form, including the Malabo Protocol’s vision of an African criminal jurisdiction and broader efforts to locate accountability closer to affected societies. Whatever one’s view of those projects, their core claim is simple. Accountability that feels like external conquest will not last, and systems that cannot deliver consequences will be bypassed.
Seen through this lens, Maduro’s capture is not an isolated episode. It signals impatience with layered legality. Domestic processes are dismissed as compromised. Regional pathways are treated as slow or ineffectual. Global institutions are portrayed as procedural rather than decisive. Into that gap steps a powerful state, calling its shortcut necessity. With repetition, such practice hardens into norm, and the old vocabulary of restraint is quietly discarded.
Nigeria has experienced a related pattern, even without troops on the ground. Under the Trump administration, pressure arrived through designations, threatened sanctions, visa restrictions, and broader entry limitations, justified by governance and rights concerns. These measures were not routed through African regional mechanisms, nor framed as cooperative accountability. They were framed as leverage. The message was familiar. Domestic and regional processes may be praised, but they can be ignored when outcomes are slow or uncertain.
Set Venezuela and Nigeria side by side and the jurisprudential anxiety sharpens. If international law ultimately reduces to might is right, doctrines like complementarity, immunity, and subsidiarity are unnecessary. Power can act first and rationalize later. The post-1945 project sought to do the opposite. It tried to make power answerable to form. The problem here is not that the United States seeks accountability. It is that it models a method of accountability that weaker states cannot accept as a general rule, because they know who will most often be “seized” in the name of necessity.
That is why this episode should trouble even those who loathe Maduro’s record. The act collapses the distance between prosecution and regime change. Official messaging has mixed law enforcement language with talk of control and resources. When punishment and dominion share the same register, legality begins to look like something worn only when convenient.
Universal jurisdiction, complementarity, and regional complementarity are not finished. But they are under strain from a faster, harsher geopolitics. The task for national and regional systems is not louder rhetoric. It is operational credibility. Investigations that bite, arrest cooperation that works, and political backing that survives the first powerful defendant. Without that, regional justice will remain a ceremonial stop on the road from domestic failure to external coercion.
The deeper warning is simple. When unilateral enforcement replaces shared process, international criminal law ceases to function as a system and becomes a contest of reach. International legal order flattens into a single question: who can act. If that is the future, the next Maduro will not only be seized by the United States. He will be seized by anyone with the capacity to do so, and the rest of us will keep calling it law because we have exhausted the alternatives.