Nicaragua announced on Thursday its withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council, after experts appointed by the organisation accused President Daniel Ortega’s government of widespread repression.
The decision to quit the council and all related activities was “irrevocable,” Ortega’s wife Rosario Murillo, who has been named “co-president” under contested reforms, told pro-government media.
“These disrespectful mechanisms have lost their nature and essence,” she said, accusing UN bodies of attacking Nicaragua’s sovereignty.
According to the UN, the experts found that Ortega and Murillo had “deliberately transformed the country into an authoritarian state where no independent institutions remain, opposition voices are silenced, and the population -– both inside and outside Nicaragua –- faces persecution, forced exile and economic retaliation.”
The experts said that a sweeping constitutional reform granting the couple control of all state entities “represented a final blow to the rule of law” in the Central American nation.
Their report said Ortega’s leftist government had recruited ex-combatants, retired soldiers and police, judges and public employees for a “volunteer” force to support the national police.
This force “evokes the nefarious role of masked groups that led the lethal repression of the 2018 anti-government protests” that left more than 300 people dead, one of the UN experts, Reed Brody, told AFP.
The Managua government considers the 2018 protests an attempted coup sponsored by Washington.
Ortega, 79, has engaged in increasingly authoritarian practices, tightening control over all sectors of the state with the support of Murillo in what critics describe as a nepotistic dictatorship.
Ortega first served as president from 1985 to 1990 as a former guerrilla hero who helped oust the US-backed Somoza regime, and returned to power in 2007. Nicaragua has jailed hundreds of opponents, real and perceived, since then.
— Times/AFP
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Publish date : 2025-02-28 06:14:00
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