[torstenvl]

I share your strong distaste for their morally repugnant acts. But when we provide military reinforcements to a sovereign government at their invitation, we have no right under international law to take over their criminal justice system, no matter how corrupt or backwards.

[massivecali]

My understanding is that every US military base, while not American sovereign territory, is still subject to US law. Not a lawyer, so not sure how that shakes out. I'd prefer we stop playing world police, but that is not going to happen.

Why is there no backlash from the international community at large? There are always articles about human trafficking but no UN outrage over stuff like this. Is it because it's boys and not "defenseless" girls?

[torstenvl]

Well. For the most part, when we play world police, it's under the auspices of international law. Even the Bush Administration felt compelled to frame the Iraq War as a matter of self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter (regardless of the... questionable... intelligence they used - for the purposes of this conversation I'm talking about the legal framework used, not the merits of any particular application).

And there really isn't an international legal framework that allows anyone to enforce human rights in another country. The closest match would be if the issue creates a "breach of the peace" and the U.N. Security Council acts under Articles 39 and 42 of the U.N. Charter. Sometimes we take actions that look like it (e.g., our response to Syrian chemical weapon use), but we justify it under another basis.

The U.K. has recently taken the position that "humanitarian intervention," in and of itself, constitutes a legal basis for the use of force ("LBUF"), but it would take widespread agreement and years of state practice for that to become customary international law (CIL). It's also not clear what the legal standard would be.

The U.S., China, and Russia all formally oppose humanitarian intervention as an LBUF, for somewhat obvious reasons: none of them want either of the other two to claim a right to military force based on drastically different views of human rights, e.g., the U.S. using military force to free Tibet.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force_by_states

Forward military bases don't typically apply U.S. domestic law. That's why the UCMJ applies worldwide to military members and also to civilians accompanying them in the field. 10 U.S.C. § 802(a)(10) available at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/802. You may recall this being a major issue with Blackwater agents committing crimes while on security detail with the State Department and nobody being able to figure out a way to charge them.