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The Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua presented its report on the situation in that country on March 2. Throughout 24 widely documented pages, those responsible for the report demonstrate that “serious violations and abuses of human rights have occurred in a” systematic and repeated manner. President Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo and the high command of the National Police Headquarters “participated in the commission of these crimes,” accuse the experts.
Jan Simon, President of the Human Rights Expert Group on Nicaragua spoke to Radio France International about the content of the report, and stressed that despite having asked the Nicaraguan government on several occasions for access to the country, ‘access was denied to us; Furthermore, the Nicaraguan government did not recognize the mandate given by the Human Rights Council to the Group of experts‘
Extrajudicial executions (115 confirmed deaths), torture, kidnapping, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, rape of men and women, illegal deprivation of nationality, are some of the innumerable violations of human rights that the Group was able to verify through the testimonies collected during more than a year of work.
As a consequence of the repeated violation of human rights, thousands of Nicaraguans chose to flee the country to save their lives. According to the data collected, as of June 2022, more than 260,000 Nicaraguans had left the country.’A situation in which the State takes almost its entire population hostage generates this type of situation, we are facing an exodus of any citizen or person who can be defined as non-compliant with the government. That gives an idea of the magnitude of the repression that is taking place at the moment.i’, underlines the president of the UN Group of Experts.
In parallel, the government resorted to the approval of a series of laws to restrict and criminalize the exercise of democratic freedoms. What is significant in this case is that all state institutions intervened to endorse them: the National Assembly, the Police, the Judiciary, the Public Ministry. “The courts also made excessive and arbitrary use of pretrial detention, imposing it across the board, without taking into account the specific circumstances of each case.“, says the report
‘When speaking of justice, it is a justice in which the accusation is equivalent to the process, and the process is equivalent to the sentence. Basically we are facing a judicial process in which there is neither due process nor guarantee of defense and where the accusation of the prosecution is already equivalent to the sentence from the first moment that a trial is opened.‘, observes the UN expert.
‘It is a political persecution, and the objective of that is to stay in power at all costs. And the cost is human lives, their physical integrity, their patrimony -because they are confiscating their patrimony from people, and even their own characteristic of people as a citizen in the State’
Given the fact of having committed and continuing to commit crimes against humanity, the international community has the responsibility to protect the Nicaraguan people and each one who is suffering the consequences of political persecution in their country, the experts claim
