Paul Reichler, former international legal adviser to the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo at the International Court of Justice, indicated that his resignation from office was “an observation process” and was carried out at the “appropriate moment”, since he could not abandon his responsibilities as a lawyer for the State of Nicaragua for the pending cases that he had to defend.
In an interview with the journalist Lucía Pineda Ubau for 100% News, the lawyer explained that it was impossible to make the decision to resign from one day to the next. “I have responsibilities not with the president, but with the State of Nicaragua to serve him as a lawyer until the conclusion of the pending case, abandoning the client at that time, on the eve of the final hearing, would be causing serious damage,” he said.
«As a lawyer I had to fulfill my obligations to represent the country in the pending cases until their end. And when those last two cases were over, I already had freedom to resign my position,” he stressed.
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Paul Reichler stated that the repression and violence exerted by the Ortega regime, during the social protests in April 2018, affected him; and since that event «I began to have my doubts about the ethics of maintaining my relationship with this government, however based on the history I had with the government and with President Ortega, I still had hope at that time, that through a dialogue national, perhaps a national agreement there was the possibility of holding free elections and confirming a democratic politics.
The international lawyer assured that the Ortega administration, by not allowing participation in the electoral day of November 7 in 2021, “was categorically defined as a dictatorship.”
“For me, the government was categorically defined when they began to harass, threaten, and imprison citizens who were openly expressing their politics and were separating to participate as a candidate in those 2021 elections. The government sent a very clear signal that it was not going to tolerate the opposition in any form, it was not going to hold free elections. There was no possibility of establishing or maintaining a democratic system, it was totally the opposite; the government defined itself as a dictatorship », he stressed.
Nicaraguan Army is a “shame”
Paul Reichlerin an interview with Lucía Pineda Ubau, asserted that the Nicaraguan Army “became a shame” for submitting to the orders of the Daniel Ortega dictatorship and failing to protect Nicaraguans.
“The Nicaraguan army has become a national shame, an army totally submissive to a person, a dictator, who serves the dictator instead of his constitutional duties,” he said.
He stressed that the military institution, in the 1980s and 1990s, represented the transformation and consolidation of democracy in Nicaragua. «The Nicaraguan Army was something very special, responsible with the government of Doña Violeta and Antonio Lacayo for the democratic transformation, the consolidation of democracy, the supremacy of the law, the Nicaraguan Army was a model within a democratic system, a source of national pride.
In addition, he cataloged the sanctioned military chief Julio César Avilés of “puppet”, since it has served and supported the Ortega regime in these four years of crisis, where the dictatorship has clearly violated the human rights of Nicaraguans.
«It has lent itself to being an instrument of support for the dictatorship instead of an instrument of support for a constitutional and democratic system, that is a great tragedy. If we examine the armies in Central America, Latin America or in the world, the Nicaraguan Army was a model of professionalism, of commitment to democracy, it was a national asset of great importance, but now this army under its current commander is nothing more than a puppet of the dictatorship,” he said.
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The 27th of March, Paul Reichler He resigned from his position as Nicaraguan international legal adviser before the Inter-American Court of Justice, in The Hague, after being in the position for more than 20 years.
With the departure of Nicaragua’s international legal adviser, there are already two representatives of the Ortega regime who have turned their backs on him this March, the first to do so in a live broadcast during a session of the Organization of American States ( OAS) was Arturo McFields, former Nicaraguan ambassador to that organization and who also denounced the crimes against humanity committed by the dictatorship.
