The deputies of the European Parliament (EP) debated this Tuesday, December 14, and will vote on Thursday 16, a new resolution on the “situation in Nicaragua”, in which – according to a unified proposal – they condemn “the electoral farce” of November 7 and ignore the “institutional authorities” that emerged from those elections.
For MEPs, the past elections violated “all international democratic parameters for credible, inclusive, fair and transparent elections ”.
According to the draft resolution, the European Parliament “it rejects the legitimacy of the results of these false elections and, therefore, the democratic legitimacy of any institutional authority that arises from this rigged vote ”.
What’s more, “supports the statements affirming that these elections complete the conversion of Nicaragua into an autocratic regime ”.
Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo were re-elected for one more term as president and vice president of Nicaragua, in an election classified as a “farce” by national organizations and national and international expertsas the regime wiped out its political rivals by jailing the seven main opposition candidates and outlawing the only two opposition parties.
Isolate the regime
In a recent interview with the show This week Y CONFIDENTIAL, the Spanish MEP, Soraya Rodríguez, stated that they want the EP to “clearly and unanimously support” that the Nicaraguan elections were “really an electoral fraud.”
“The Ortega regime in recent months approved a series of laws that allowed it to imprison all those who expressed their willingness to be candidates in those elections, therefore there were more candidates imprisoned than candidates on the ballot,” said Rodríguez, Member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament and spokesperson for human rights.
“We want to isolate the Ortega and Murillo regime, but we want to be very close to Nicaraguan civil society,” said the MEP.
In the draft resolution, MEPs recall that, “In light of the Association Agreement between the EU and Central America, Nicaragua must respect and consolidate the principles of the rule of law, democracy and human rights”; Therefore, it “reiterates its demand that, in light of the current circumstances, the democratic clause of the Association Agreement be activated.”
Likewise, the Europarliament “calls on the international community and like-minded democratic partners to increase their political pressure on the Nicaraguan regime in a coordinated manner in multilateral forums, in order to help and lead to a rapid transition in which the Nicaraguan people can fully recover democratic order and popular sovereignty ”.
They demand to sanction Daniel Ortega
Likewise, MEPs support the decision of the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security, Josep Borrell, to consider “all the instruments at the disposal of the EU to take additional measures, including those that can go beyond individual restrictions, while at the same time aiming to avoid any measure that could potentially aggravate the difficulties of the Nicaraguan people.”
Chancellors of the EU Last October they asked Borrell to prepare a series of measures against the Nicaraguan government, which could include more sanctions against senior officials.
The EU extended last month until October 2022 and for the second year in a row the sanctions it approved against Nicaragua in 2019, which include 14 high-ranking officials of the regime, including the vice president and first lady, Rosario Murillo.
None of them can enter Community territory and their assets and shares in the EU have been frozen.
According to the draft resolution, the European Parliament “welcomes the inclusion of Rosario Murillo, along with several others, in the list of sanctioned renewed until October 2022; asks that Daniel Ortega be added to the sanctioned list without delay ”.
Release of political prisoners
The draft resolution integrates the proposals for resolutions of six parliamentary groups. European Parliament sources indicated to CONFIDENTIAL that the political benches agreed on several points and there were agreements between the groups, so the negotiations to unify the text were “quite good.”
Since the civic outbreak of April 2018, the European Parliament has passed five resolutions on the crisis in Nicaragua. One in May 2018; another in March 2019 -after the visit of a delegation of MEPs to the country-; a third in December 2019; a fourth in October 2020; and the last one last July.
In the proposal, the MEPs reiterate “their call for the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners, opposition activists, defenders of human rights and the environment and arbitrarily detained journalists”, and demand “the nullity of the judicial processes against him”.
In addition, they condemn “the continuous psychological and physical abuse they suffer at the hands of the Police and prison authorities, of which women are a special target, and the solitary confinement of some of them without access to their lawyers, relatives or medical attention ”.
