UN experts allege Nicaragua's leaders may have committed crimes against humanity

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — 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 been investigating allegations of human rights violations and abuses in Nicaragua, which the country’s government denies, since April 2018. The U.N. experts said they have documented actions by husband-and-wife leaders Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo aimed at eliminating opposition through arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, political persecution and stripping opponents of their 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. ”

In response, Nicaragua called the Human Rights Council — a U.N. agency that it has withdrawn from — “manipulated, obsolete and interfering” and accused “neo-colonialist powers” of weaponizing human rights for “political aggression.”

Since mass protests in 2018 , which led to a bloody government crackdown that killed hundreds , Ortega and his wife have held on to power.

Ortega declared himself the winner of the 2021 election — a vote widely viewed as illegitimate by the international community — after jailing all the candidates who could have possibly beaten him. The United States does not recognize Ortega’s presidency.

Nicaragua’s government has imprisoned or exiled adversaries, religious leaders, journalists and more, stripping hundreds of their citizenship, homes and possessions. Since 2018, it has shuttered more than 5,000 organizations , largely religious, and forced thousands to flee the country.

The government often accuses critics and organizations it targets of working for the U.S. and its enemies to undermine its power.

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, and under the constitution adopted last year, the legislature and judiciary are no longer independent but controlled by the co-presidents.

“There are no opposition parties left, no independent press inside the country," 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, Brody said, at least 452 Nicaraguans considered political opponents have been declared “traitors” and stripped of their citizenship, leaving them stateless, including former Sandinista leaders, a former vice president and all presidential candidates from 2021.

A transnational surveillance network also “monitors, intimidates, and attacks the hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans” abroad, he said.

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 urge countries to bring a case against Nicaragua to the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s highest tribunal, for violating the convention on statelessness, he said.

Nicaragua, however, is not a party to the International Criminal Court.