The lack of results, the dilation of processes and an “insufficient investigation” by the Government of Nicolás Maduro, regarding the complaints of violations in the anti-government protests of 2017, was what moved the International Criminal Court to take the reins of the investigations of Caracas.
First modification:
For the International Criminal Court, the Nicolás Maduro regime has not made the necessary efforts to identify the crimes committed during the 2017 demonstrations against the Government.
In the protests, international human rights organizations denounced the strong repression of the march against the Government that left a hundred dead, accusations that the Maduro administration did not deny, but which have been pointed out as lacking in rigor.
The court had suspended the investigation into alleged crimes, including excessive use of force and torture, after Venezuela requested to take up the case through its national justice system in 2022.
Seven months later, prosecutor Karim Khan attempted to reopen his investigation, saying that Venezuelan efforts to deliver justice “remain insufficient in scope or have not yet had any concrete impact on potentially relevant proceedings.”
This Tuesday, June 27, the ICC recognized that the internal judicial processes of Venezuela, regarding this aspect, have focused on the material authors of the crimes, but without any approach to punish the intellectual authors of the crimes.
“Internal investigations seem to not sufficiently address the forms of crime that the Prosecutor’s Office intends to investigate, referring in particular to the discriminatory intent underlying the alleged crime of persecution and the apparently insufficient investigation of crimes of a sexual nature,” said the Chamber of Questions. ICC preliminaries.
Under this argument, the international court delegated its prosecutor, Karim Khan, to resume the investigations, specifying that with this announcement “Caracas is not prevented from providing material that determines inadmissibility on the basis of complementarity.”
In other words, the road is still open for the South American country to demonstrate that its judiciary is at an advanced stage in its investigations and that the intervention of the ICC is not necessary. The Venezuelan State can also appeal the decision of the great court.
However, the Court’s decision was based on reports from prosecutors who have reviewed many of the reported cases, added to the forms submitted by more than 8,000 victims in the repression.
With this Tuesday’s ruling came applause from Human Rights Watch: “With today’s decision, ICC judges have given the green light to the only credible path to justice for victims of abuses by the government of Nicolás Maduro,” said Juanita Goebertus, director of the entity for the Americas.
“The decision confirms that Venezuela is not acting to bring justice for the crimes that are likely to be within the ICC investigation. Impunity remains the norm,” he added.
The background of the case
One year after the massive protests in which the alleged cases of crimes against humanity were denounced, members of Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay and Peru, carried out inquiries that not only went back to the anti-government demonstrations, but also they escalated until early 2014, a year after Maduro took power.
The ICC is a high international Court in which cases of last instance arrive in which crimes against humanity and other serious crimes have allegedly occurred.
Legal proceedings go this far only when the countries involved have not been able to carry out investigations or simply do not want to.
In the case of Venezuela, the investigations were initially in charge of Khan’s predecessor, prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.
She carried out a preliminary investigation and in 2020 her finding served as the basis for concluding that crimes against humanity had been committed in Venezuela, at least since April 2017.
Bensouda’s investigation focused mainly on allegations of excessive use of force, arbitrary detention and torture by security forces during the crackdown on anti-government protests in 2017, with no results of possible cases committed since 2014.
The judges also noted that “Venezuela appears to have taken limited investigative measures and that, in many cases, there appear to be periods of unexplained investigative inactivity,” the court said in its statement.
With Reuters and AP
