The Ortega justice system invented the legal figure of “informative hearing” to exhibit the political prisoners of El Chipote, lawyers and human rights defenders warn, after arguing that the Nicaraguan Criminal Procedure Code (CPP) does not establish in any of its articles the celebration of “informative hearings”, for which reason their convening and carrying out is “illegal” and pursues “political” ends.
It is “a strategy of repression”, which evidences “cruel and degrading treatment” against prisoners of conscience, and which also seeks to “discredit” the complaint of their relatives, who have warned of the risk in which their lives are in prison, incommunicado, without access to timely medical care and sufficient food, considered Vilma Núñez, president of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh), who describes these hearings as a “Continuation of the judicial farce that has been the trials”.
Magistrate without competition
After more than a year of confinement and hermetic political trials, the media affiliated with the regime presented photographs and videos of the ten political prisoners who were taken to the Managua courts to the “informative hearings”, led by Judge Octavio Ernesto Rothschuh. , president of Chamber One of the Court of Appeals of Managua (TAM).
However, according to defense attorneys, the TAM no longer has the power to hold hearings, since it passed sentences in most of the cases of political prisoners in El Chipote. Its function, at this time, “is to verify that the appeals filed by the defenses meet the legal requirements to be admitted and take the case to the Supreme Court of Justice,” explained a defense attorney, who asked to omit his name. For security.
The official media indicated that Rothschuh informed the political prisoners about the status of the different judicial appeals presented by their lawyers, but the magistrate did not summon the defense lawyers either.
“The call is illegal because the lawyer was not there, that hearing is illegal because it does not exist,” said a defense attorney.
Read the full article here:
Dictatorship “invents” audiences to exhibit political prisoners
