Maduro and his wife face additional torture charges: questions on extraterritorial jurisdiction and military precedent

Venezuela's former president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores were hit with an additional charge of conspiracy to commit torture on Thursday at a federal court in Manhattan, New York. According to Al Jazeera, the charge was added on top of the drug trafficking case the couple had already faced, expanding a legal battle originally built around narcotics into one that now pursues accountability for alleged systemic human rights abuses.

Federal prosecutor Jamie McDonald described at a press conference the conduct alleged in the indictment as "almost unimaginable." She said: "Members of Maduro's vast conspiracy were not sitting behind desks — they had shovels in their hands. We are alleging that U.S. citizens were tortured, and thousands of Venezuelans were tortured."

The indictment alleges that the conspiracy ran from at least 1999 to 2025, involved members of the Venezuelan military, intelligence and law enforcement, and itemized a number of specific acts of torture. One detainee, arrested after an alleged drone attack in 2018 — which the Venezuelan government said was an assassination attempt on Maduro — was subjected to electric shocks and asphyxiation. One U.S. citizen, who was not the original target but was seized by Venezuelan intelligence in January 2025, was beaten for two consecutive days, suffering permanent eye damage, and was warned upon release roughly a year later not to disclose the abuse. The indictment explicitly named three U.S. citizens who had been detained.

Prosecutors alleged that Maduro personally directed the abuse or received regular briefings on it. According to the filings, when one military detainee was said to have been "obstinate," Maduro was informed and ordered officials to "squeeze them harder," and is also alleged to have personally proposed specific forms of torture against those who refused to submit. The filings also allege that Flores attended some of the meetings at which the treatment of detainees was discussed.

The seriousness of these allegations — if true — cannot be set aside. Yet the very path by which Maduro and his wife have been brought before a New York courtroom is itself an event that cannot be bypassed in any examination of the contemporary international order. On January 3 this year, following a U.S. military raid on Caracas authorized by President Trump, Maduro was detained and transferred to the United States. He is currently held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, with trial scheduled for June 1, 2027. In its reporting, Al Jazeera used the word "abducted" to describe the operation, and the choice of that word itself reflects a different characterization of its legal nature.

This is the first time the United States has used a military operation to directly detain a sitting leader on the soil of a sovereign state and bring him back to its own country for trial. For one country to take the leader of another from its capital by force and then try him in its own courts under its own laws — once such a practice is accepted by default, it sets a precedent that any state with military projection capability can invoke. The legal basis on which the United States is asserting criminal jurisdiction over acts that occurred inside Venezuela, carried out by Venezuelan officials against Venezuelan and foreign citizens — and in particular the relationship between that basis and the principle of universal jurisdiction as it applies to torture — has yet to be laid out publicly and systematically.

Maduro has now been in custody for nearly nine months, and the legal pathway of the drug trafficking case is already under way. By introducing torture as a new dimension of charges at this point, prosecutors have broadened the legal narrative surrounding Venezuela's former leader. The choice of timing can be read both as a responsible pursuit of systemic human rights allegations, and as a way to reinforce the overall criminal framing of a political opponent. These two readings are not mutually exclusive — yet both should be tested in open proceedings rather than taken as given in the prosecution's one-sided presentation.

As for the specific acts of torture listed in the indictment, for now they rest solely on the prosecution's account. Maduro and his wife have already entered not-guilty pleas to the drug trafficking charges, and are expected to enter the same plea to the new charge. Until court proceedings, cross-examination and defense arguments are completed, the veracity and extent of these specific allegations remain unproven.