Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega deported 222 anti-government demonstrators and political prisoners, including opposition politicians, priests, students, and civil activists, to the United States last week, foreign media including the Associated Press reported.
President Ortega released all of these political prisoners, whom the international community had demanded to be released, sent them to the United States and even deprived them of their citizenship. Political analysts, human rights groups and legal experts have denounced it as a political retaliation and an unprecedented violation of international law, the largest and most shocking expulsion case in the Western Hemisphere.
Their deportation came as the Ortega government brutally suppressed anti-government protests by the public since 2018 and suppressed opposition forces.
Ortega calls these inmates “traitors” and claims they have been organizing and instigating anti-government protests with foreign funding to oust him. Hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans have already fled or emigrated as a result of government crackdowns and arrests.
They have become a weak point for Ortega internationally, and in particular, US President Joe Biden is imposing various sanctions against Nicaragua for incarceration of political prisoners.
Ivan Brisco, CEO of the International Crisis Group, an international non-profit organization that monitors conflict zones around the world, analyzes that the release is a ploy to minimize the cost of maintaining Ortega’s dictatorship.
“It is Ortega’s purpose to maintain a steady low-level dictatorship without visible resistance or violence,” he said.
Regarding this, State Department spokesman Ned Price in Washington said at a press conference on the 13th that “the release of political prisoners in Nicaragua is a constructive first step,” and that the Biden administration is also willing to resume dialogue between the two countries.
However, the fact that Ortega-controlled National Assembly deprived them of their citizenship and expelled them at the same time as their release is receiving great criticism from the international community. The constitutional amendment still needs to be finalized in the second round of voting to take effect, but in the first round of voting, ruling party lawmakers overwhelmingly voted to deprive the releaseees of their citizenship.
This is a violation of international law and a violation of the 1961 United Nations resolution for the prevention of statelessness, says Professor Peter Spiro, an international law expert at Temple University in the US.
According to a treaty passed by the United Nations, “no government in the world may deprive any individual or member of any group of nationality on racial, religious or political grounds.”
Professor Spiro said that if a person has the nationality of one country and acquires the nationality of another country, the first country can deprive the nationality of the person to prevent dual citizenship. said to be forbidden.
Meanwhile, the United States granted two years of special protection status to the deported Nicaraguans, and Spain offered Spanish nationality to all 222.
However, Jenny Lincoln, a Latin American officer at the Carter Center in the US who has dealt with numerous political prisoner immigrants, said that most former political prisoners living in the US live in legal and mental confusion and a sense of alienation.
It is because deportation itself is a violation of human rights, and people who are suddenly thrown from prison to the United States by plane are shocked and mentally stateless.
Experts are particularly concerned about Ortega’s critic, Bishop Ronaldo Alvarez of the Nicaraguan Catholic Church, refusing to go to the United States and choosing to remain in the country. He refused to board the plane, saying that going to America would be like admitting to a crime he didn’t commit.
Ortega then sentenced Alvarez to 26 years in prison, put him in a notorious prison, and stripped him of his citizenship at home.
The US State Department protested, but Bishop Alvarez was left in a more severe legal defenselessness than those who went to the United States.
So far, there is no way anyone has met Alveres or confirmed that he is safe or alive. Those who were questioned about him begged to shut up or not to reveal his name for fear of reprisal, the Associated Press reported.
Source: Donga
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.