When Nicolás Maduro appears in a New York courtroom to face U.S. drug charges, he’ll be following follow a path taken Panama’s Manuel Noriega, another strongman who was toppled by American forces. As was the case with Noriega, lawyers for Maduro are expected to challenge his arrest by claiming so.
When deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro makes his first appearance in New York courtroom Monday to face U.S. drug charges, he will likely follow the path taken by another Latin American strongman toppled by U.S. forces: Panama’s Manuel Noriega.
Maduro was captured Saturday, 36 years to the day after Noriega was removed by American forces. And as was the case with the Panamanian leader, lawyers for Maduro are expected to contest the legality of his arrest, arguing that he is immune from prosecution as a sovereign head of foreign state, which is a bedrock principle of international and U.S. law.
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That argument is unlikely to succeed and was largely settled as a matter of law in Noriega’s trial, legal experts said. Trump’s ordering of the operation in Venezuela raises its own constitutional concerns because it was not authorized by Congress, now that Maduro is in the United States. But American courts are to allow Maduro’s prosecution to proceed because, like Noriega in Panama, the U.S. government does not recognize him as Venezuela’s legitimate leader.
“There’s no claim to sovereign immunity if we don’t recognize him as head of state,” said Dick Gregorie, a retired federal prosecutor who indicted Noriega and later went on to investigate corruption inside Maduro’s government. “Several U.S. administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have called his election fraudulent and withheld U.S. recognition. Sadly, for Maduro, it means he’s stuck with it.”
Noriega died in 2017 after nearly three decades in prison, first in the U.S., then France and finally Panama. In his first trial, his lawyers argued that his arrest as a result of a U.S. invasion was so “shocking to the conscience » that it rendered the government’s case an illegal violation of his due process rights.
In ordering Noriega’s removal, the White House relied on a 1989 legal opinion by then-Assistant Attorney General Bill Barr, issued six months before the invasion. That opinion said the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force in international relations does not prohibit the U.S. from carrying out “forcible abductions” abroad to enforce domestic laws.
