For the lawyer for political prisoners and human rights defender Yonarqui Martínez, the situation of the priests kidnapped by the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo is “quite alarming.” Martínez refers that the Police, at the service of the regime, are taking de facto measures that are not based on the laws of Nicaragua.
The lawyer explained to Article 66 that the police authorities are not “respecting the law from the moment that the priests are kidnapped in Matagalpa, they are held illegally, that is an anomaly.” He affirmed that to this day it is not known for sure if Monsignor Rolando Álvarez has been legally accused or if he has some special measure, which has to be ordered by a judge.
«This figure of home protection does not exist. The Police do not have the power to issue arrest warrants to a citizen. The only person who can issue deprivation of liberty or change of measure is a judge and so far we have no knowledge of it, “he said.
In this same sense, the lawyer and former official of the Judiciary in exile, Yader Morazán, indicated that Monsignor Rolando Álvarez is not at home because of prison, nor in house protection; but that “his kidnapping of him is computed since August 4 and not since he was forcibly transferred, and that now that illegality transcends other relatives unrelated to his” cause “.
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Martinez points out that the police statement It lacks a legal basis because “a de facto, capricious police guard was imposed. It is not stipulated in the law. There is no norm that regulates it, that proceeds within the faculties of the Police; therefore, it is an illegal attitude and violates the process and violation of human rights.
“Nicaragua is the country where the institutions do their own thing and the whim of the procedures. We do not have an impartial entity to which we can go and request that the procedures be carried out according to law. Unfortunately we are defenseless, all the priests are defenseless. It is a cluster of violations of due process and human rights that are concatenated to harm priests », he stressed.
According to attorney Martínez, in addition to the series of irregularities that have been committed since they were detained in the Episcopal Curia of Matagalpa, a series of rights that are protected in the Political Constitution of the Republic and laws such as: right to life, right to belief, right to individual liberty, protection and respect for private life, equality before the law, the inviolability of the home, freedom of conscience and thought, freedom of movement, principle of legality, criminal procedural guarantees of violence , presumption of innocence, abduction from a natural judge, right to a remedy, right to defense and the right to property.
For its part, the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (Cenidh) also denounced that priests and laity are having their fundamental rights violated by the Ortega and Murillo dictatorship. “We demand immediate freedom for them and for all political prisoners,” Cenidh wrote on its Twitter social network account.
