The Nicaraguan Never Again Human Rights Collective alleged that with the recently approved law that will regulate Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), the Daniel Ortega regime intends to continue its persecution and criminalization of the right of association and citizen participation in the country.
Through a release, the agency rejected the approval of the recent “General Law for the Regulation and Control of Non-Profit Organizations”. The dictatorship with the new legislation seeks to legalize the confiscation of the assets of the NGOs whose legal personality is cancelled.
“As in the other arbitrary and unconstitutional laws, with the new regulation of non-profit organizations, the regime intends to give a face of legality to its abuses of power and disguise itself before an international community that is widely aware of the serious violations of human rights and crimes against humanity committed against the people of Nicaragua,” the entity said.
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For the Collective, the new law is part of the legislative combo considered “oppressive, regressive and harmful to the human rights of the Nicaraguan people, whose objective is to strengthen repression, in this particular case, to the detriment of organized civil society and the right participation in the public affairs of the country.
Article 47 of the law establishes nine ways in which the Ortega Assembly can cancel the legal personality of NGOs: dissolution and liquidation; when it was used to commit illicit acts; when it was used to violate public order; to hinder the control and surveillance of the Directorate of Registration and Control of the Ministry of the Interior; when they distort the objectives and purposes for which it was created.
Among the other reasons to cancel them, they highlight that they will be annihilated when they have at least one year of non-compliance before the enforcement authority, by not reporting financial statements and changes in the board of directors; when their activities are contrary to the nature of the legal personality; for using the organizational scheme to promote destabilization campaigns in the country; for administrative sanction derived from non-compliance with their obligations or carrying out prohibited actions.
The final part of the mentioned article establishes that “when the cancellation (of the legal personality) derives from the causes established in numerals 2 to 9 of this article (47), the patrimony of the NPO (Non-Profit Organization) will pass to be the property of the state.
The Human Rights organization detailed that around 135 civil society organizations have been canceled by the Ortega dictatorship. “We condemn the systematic repression that the Ortega Murillo regime promotes against civil society organizations, violating the human rights of thousands of beneficiaries,” the statement read.
