The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered Nicaragua to adopt provisional measures in favor of 115 opponents due to the “non-compliance” and “permanent contempt” of previous court resolutions.
“The position assumed by Nicaragua and the failure to comply with what was ordered” in previous resolutions “constitutes a permanent disregard for the binding nature of the decisions adopted by this court,” the Inter-American Court indicated in a resolution.
The continental court, based in San José, decided to maintain the provisional measures previously ordered in favor of 115 opponents, 105 of whom were expelled from the country and their nationality withdrawn.
Since February 2023, the government of Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, has already stripped the nationality of some 450 politicians, businessmen, journalists, intellectuals, human rights activists and religious people who were expelled from Nicaragua.
“Such deportation (…) could put the beneficiaries who were deported at extreme risk of suffering irreparable harm to their rights,” the court argued.
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Among those affected are the exiled Nicaraguan journalist Juan Sebastián Chamorro; the former presidential candidate exiled in the United States, Félix Maradiaga; the former guerrilla commander, Dora María Téllez; or Bishop Rolando Álvarez.
Ortega’s government has endured repression since the 2018 opposition protests, which left more than 300 dead in three months, according to the UN, considered by Managua as an attempted coup by Washington.
He recently reformed the Constitution to consolidate his power by extending the presidential term from five to six years and created a Presidency composed of a “co-president” and a “co-president”, who “coordinate” the rest of the powers of the State.
The Inter-American Court also required the release of nine people currently imprisoned in Nicaragua, that they be guaranteed health and food, and that until their release they can have access to family and lawyers.
He also called Nicaragua to a public hearing “on the implementation of the provisional measures issued in favor of the beneficiaries” at the headquarters of the Court of Measures in San José on February 4, 2025.
Ortega, a 79-year-old former guerrilla who governed Nicaragua in the 1980s after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution, has remained in power since 2007 after three re-elections, the last of them in 2021 in elections with the opposition imprisoned or in exile.
