Report

With hard testimonies based on lengthy interviews with people who were victims of torture during their arbitrary detention and long periods of imprisonment in prisons in Nicaragua, the RIDHE presented its report entitled “Detained, Tortured and Displaced Persons. Political imprisonment and its aftermath in Nicaragua. It is a document about torture and the inhuman, cruel and degrading treatment of people deprived of their liberty in conditions of political detention in Nicaragua and the persistence of State violence in their post-prison lives. “This report directed and prepared for the United Nations Committee against Torture (CAT), based on interviews with people who were victims of torture, people who were arrested as a result of the repression unleashed by the State in the face of demonstrations,” said the director of RIDHE, Electra Lagos.

The document also differs from the common format, due to the type of investigation carried out and the dangerous situation in which the thirty victims presented, who call themselves political prisoners, find themselves.

The researchers explained that the self-denomination of (former) political prisoners or released prisoners is due to the fact that their imprisonment was considered unfair, since it was the product of the defense of their rights during and after the protests that began in April 2018, in the face of the repressive policies of the State of Nicaragua and its Government. “Their arrests, which mostly received media attention and from national and international human rights organizations, were arbitrary, outside the rule of law and in disregard of due process guarantees,” RIDHE project officer Winnie Bernard explained during the virtual presentation of the document.

The report that was presented to the United Nations General Assembly, denounces and analyzes that since the beginning of the protests in April 2018 against the government led by President Daniel Ortega, more than one thousand six hundred people have been arrested and more than eight hundred of them have been tried and sentenced to prison by biased judges in favor of the current government.

The convictions were for alleged common crimes, such as robbery, drug trafficking, illegal carrying or possession of weapons, as well as extraordinary crimes that prior to April 2018 were not classified as crimes in the Criminal Code, such as terrorism. At the time, most political prisoners (including several of the victims here) were released under the controversial Amnesty Act enacted on June 8, 2019.

“Their arrests... were arbitrary, outside the rule of law and in disregard of the guarantees of due process”

At the same time, this law allowed the perpetrators of serious human rights violations to be exonerated, specifically state and parastatal actors involved in the lethal suppression of protests and hundreds of arbitrary arrests carried out with excessive force. The State of Nicaragua has not carried out any independent judicial proceedings against them and has not compensated the victims, as highlighted in the report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the situation in Nicaragua.

On the contrary, the State has been criminalizing and prosecuting non-governmental organizations and national human rights organizations that provided support to victims in the form of receiving their complaints, psychological treatment and social assistance.

The National Assembly, dominated by the governing party, stripped the three non-state national human rights bodies (CENIDH, CPDH and ANPDH) of their legal status.

After this type of repression, the constant siege, threats, imprisonment of some of their defense workers and the seizure of their facilities, most of the remaining defense workers have had to go into exile. This situation puts all victims of human rights violations in the country at serious risk.

The thirty cases considered in the document submitted to the UN took place and were found distributed in six police detention centers (Jinotepe, Juigalpa, León, Masaya, Managua and Nindirí), the Judicial Assistance Directorate (DAJ) of Managua known as “El Chicote” and three prisons: the Jorge Navarro National Penitentiary System known as “La Modelo”, the Women's Penitentiary System known as “La Esperanza” and the Cuisalá Regional Penitentiary System.

“However, not all of the people arrested made it to the prison system, and several remained in the cells of the DAJ,” said Bernard.