Nicaraguan officials committed ‘systematic repression,’ UN says
The United Nations on Thursday named 54 officials from Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government who it said are responsible for serious human rights violations and crimes, in what was described as a “tightly coordinated system of repression.”
The United Nations on Thursday named 54 officials from Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s government who it said are responsible for serious human rights violations and crimes, in what was described as a “tightly coordinated system of repression.”
The officials cited include military officers and members of the ruling party.
In a 234-page report, the UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua revealed structures of systematic repression that quelled anti-government protests that erupted in 2018 and left at least 350 dead and hundreds detained.
The officials named “played key roles in arbitrary detentions, torture, extrajudicial executions, persecution of civil society and the media, denationalization campaigns, and the confiscation of private property,” a statement accompanying the report said.
The UN experts also underscored how Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who serves as Nicaragua’s co-president after a recent constitutional reform, have built a centralized and repressive regime that has co-opted all branches of government and blurred the boundaries between party and state.
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