United Nations human rights experts said Wednesday that Nicaragua’s co-presidents have established a dictatorship and that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed.”
The expert group has investigated allegations of human rights violations and abuses in Nicaragua since April 2018, charges the government denies. The U.N. experts said they documented efforts by husband-and-wife leaders Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo to eliminate opposition through arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, political persecution and the stripping of opponents’ citizenship.
“What we are looking at is a full dictatorship, and that dictatorship has one clear goal: permanent dynastic rule,” Jan-Michael Simon, chair of the group appointed by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, told U.N. reporters. “Four months ago, Daniel Ortega said it loud — Nicaragua will never hold elections again.”
Nicaragua responded by calling the Human Rights Council — a U.N. body the country has withdrawn from — “manipulated, obsolete and interfering.” It also accused “neo-colonialist powers” of weaponizing human rights for “political aggression.”
Ortega and Murillo have remained in power since mass protests in 2018 triggered a government crackdown that killed hundreds of people.
Ortega declared victory in the 2021 election, a vote widely viewed by the international community as illegitimate, after jailing all the candidates who might have defeated him. The United States does not recognize Ortega’s presidency.
Nicaragua’s government has imprisoned or exiled political opponents, religious leaders, journalists and others, while stripping hundreds of people of their citizenship, homes and property. Since 2018, authorities have closed more than 5,000 organizations, many of them religious, and forced thousands of Nicaraguans to flee the country.
The government frequently accuses targeted critics and organizations of working with the United States and its enemies to weaken its rule.
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Reed Brody, a member of the U.N. expert group, said Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista Party has “total control” over the police, courts and prisons. Under the constitution adopted last year, he said, the legislature and judiciary are no longer independent and instead are controlled by the co-presidents.
“There are no opposition parties left, no independent press inside the country,” and no critical nongovernmental organizations, said Brody, a Hungarian American human rights lawyer and prosecutor. “There is simply no space left for anyone to disagree.”
Since February 2023, at least 452 Nicaraguans considered political opponents have been declared “traitors” and stripped of their citizenship, leaving them stateless, Brody said. Those affected include former Sandinista leaders, a former vice president and every presidential candidate from 2021.
He said a transnational surveillance network also “monitors, intimidates, and attacks the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans” living abroad.
“The Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua has found reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed,” Brody said.
The experts are urging countries to bring a case against Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s highest tribunal, over alleged violations of the convention on statelessness, he said.
Nicaragua, however, is not a party to the International Criminal Court.
