Nicaragua is the third country with the most impunity in Latin America, ranking 38th, and only surpassed by Venezuela (11) and Haiti (15), according to the ranking of the first Atlas of World Impunity, prepared based on five variables: governance without accountability, abuse of human rights, conflict and violence, economic exploitation and environmental degradation.
The publication, produced by the Eurasian Group and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, defines impunity as “the exercise of power without accountability, which becomes, in its crudest form, the commission of crimes without punishment.
Impunity is the idea that “the law is for fools”, a notion that human rights leaders fear is on the rise in political institutions around the world”, indicates the document published on February 17, 2023 in the Munich Security Conference, Germany.
The Atlas scores and classifies the level of impunity in 163 countries and provides a partial indicative score for another 34. Each country receives a score of zero to five in each of the dimensions evaluated and the general average of all indicates its position in the ranking. general. In this way, the countries with the highest scores are the ones that are most accountable, and the lowest are the most unpunished.
Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar and the Central African Republic are the five countries in the world with the greatest impunity. In Latin America, Venezuela, governed by Nicolás Maduro, a political ally of Daniel Ortega, is the most unpunished in the region.
According to the Atlas, the result obtained is due in large part to the “authoritarian” government of Maduro, “who has intensified the repression even while adopting a more pragmatic approach to the economy.”
“Venezuela is among the five worst-performing countries on the governance without accountability dimension—behind only North Korea and ahead of Myanmar—something that is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future,” the research indicates. .
At the same time, they warn that “it is unlikely that Maduro will accept competitive presidential elections in 2024”, due to the high cost that his departure from power would imply, including prosecution for the abuses of his regime.
Nicaragua, the worst in Central America
At the level of the Central American region, Nicaragua is the worst evaluated with a score of 38, followed by Guatemala (40); Honduras (50) and El Salvador (73). On the other side, among the countries with less impunity, are Panama (114) and Costa Rica, with a score of 131, with the best evaluated dimension being “abuse of human rights” (157) and governance without accountability. (145).
On the other hand, Nicaragua is the country with the worst score in the isthmus in the dimensions of governance (14) and abuse of human rights, with 36 points. After the social outbreak of April 2018, an Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) recommended investigating Ortega and the police leadership for crimes against humanity committed against more than 300 Nicaraguanss, whose cases remain unpunished.
The violent police response to the civic protests of 2018 triggered a demand for justice and democracy, which then included the advancement of national elections and the resignation of Ortega. However, the regime increased the repression, causing disastrous economic and social consequences for the population, which has been forced to go into exile, migrate, and be forcibly displaced within the territory, fleeing the imposition of a de facto police state.
The latest unprecedented act, and which according to human rights experts constitutes another crime against humanity, was the stripping of their nationality from 317 Nicaraguans, declared through illegal judicial resolutions as “traitors to the homeland.”
The Atlas of Impunity is built based on 67 statistical indicators, extracted from 29 validated sources. The research measures impunity in five dimensions, each of which has between ten and 15 indicators that support its score. “When curating the data, we looked for data sets that were universal, independent and credible, with statistics updated annually, that could be used in future editions of the Atlas,” they point out.
The researchers point out that human rights are being abused and accountability is slipping even within democracies.
Israel, Malaysia and the USA are all democratic countries thatperform well in the governance dimension, but “substantially worse” in the abuse of human rights.
Generating global debate on the cost of impunity
The Atlas is designed to spark a vigorous debate about the rise of unaccountable power around the world. Finland, Denmark and Sweden had the lowest impunity scores.
Rather than pit democracies against autocracies, the Impunity Atlas uses the analytical framework of impunity versus accountability, which is nuanced and comprehensive enough to capture the multidimensional and interconnected nature of the challenges. global. This lens also highlights the ways in which impunity undermines democratic societies and accountability manifests itself in non-democratic systems. Variations in impunity ultimately come down to politics, leadership, and policy choices,” the study indicates.
David Miliband, former UK Foreign Secretary and co-chair of the Atlas of Impunity Advisory Council, said: “Impunity is the growing instinct of choice in the world order. It represents a dangerous worldview that laws and regulations are for fools.” In that sense, the Atlas provides for the first time independent, credible and verifiable data on five dimensions of abuse of power, he noted.
He added that “the lens of impunity and accountability captures the multidimensional nature of global challenges and the avoidance of public responsibility. Impunity thrives in the dark; this atlas is a tool to shed light on the abuse of power and spark debate about what to do about it.”
China and Russia with bad marks
Russia was ranked number 27 worldwide in the Atlas of Impunity, mainly driven by the low score in the dimension of conflict and violence (11).
The investigation indicates that President Vladimir Putin is trying to cement what he and much of Russian national security consider to be a legitimate sphere of influence. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 plunged the region into military conflict, diplomatic and economic crisis, and encouraged many neighboring countries to reduce their economic and even security dependence on Russia.
Meanwhile, China was ranked 48th globally. It is in the medium-high level of the global distribution of scores. China is in tenth place as one of the worst countries on the planet in terms of human rights.
“The Chinese state devotes immense resources to its internal security. It condones torture, capital punishment, arbitrary detention, censorship, mass surveillance, and offers scant protection to women, children, and minorities,” the report states. China is another of the recent allies of the Ortega regime, after breaking relations with Taiwan.
The Atlas of Impunity advisory board is co-chaired by David Miliband, leader of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and former UK Foreign Secretary; and Mónica Pinto, Argentine Law Professor, former UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of lawyers and judges. It is also made up of Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and activist; awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003.
