The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, urged his counterparts from the European Union (EU) this Monday to “initiate the procedure” to impose new sanctions on those responsible in Nicaragua for the last elections presidential elections, which the community bloc considered a fraud due to the lack of participation of opponents.
“We have expressed our concern about the situation after the November 7 elections. The EU statement pointing to the lack of legitimacy of the results has been a first and necessary response and others have to follow, ”Albares said at a press conference at the end of a Council of Community Foreign Ministers, where he assured that Spain raised the issue of the situation in Nicaragua.
Specifically, Albares requested “that the procedure to apply new individual sanctions be initiated and that the immediate release of political prisoners be required by the EU, of those people who were put in prison exclusively so that they could not compete in what was called elections ”.
The EU extended last month until October 2022 and for the second year in a row the sanctions it approved against Nicaragua in 2019, which include 14 high-ranking officials of the regime, including the vice president and first lady, Rosario Murillo.
None of them can enter Community territory and their assets and shares in the EU have been frozen.
Borrell: “they are a caricature”
The high representative of the EU for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, affirmed after the Council that “we condemn these false elections” in Nicaragua.
“They are a caricature, what we can call the typical and current Caribbean dictatorship,” he said.
Meeting in October in Luxembourg, the ministers then asked Borrell to start preparing a series of measures against Nicaragua, which could include sanctions, following the November 7 elections.
The new package of sanctions will be analyzed by the technical groups of the European Council – made up of the foreign ministers of the 27 EU member countries – who will define the measures and verify the unanimity of the States.
European sanctions
The legal framework for sanctions was imposed by the EU in October 2019 against persons and entities “responsible for violations or abuses of human rights or for the repression of civil society and the democratic opposition in Nicaragua”, as well as against those who carry carry out “policies or activities that undermine democracy and the rule of law”.
Besides the first lady, Juan Carlos Ortega Murillo, son of the presidential couple, have been sanctioned; the president of the National Assembly, Gustavo Porras Cortés; the president of the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ), Alba Luz Ramos Vanegas; the presidential advisor for economic affairs, Bayardo Arce Castaño; the attorney general, Ana Julia Guido Ochoa.
The police chiefs join them: the director of the National Police, first commissioner Francisco Díaz, as well as the general commissioners Luis Alberto Pérez Olivas, Justo Pastor Urbina, Ramón Avellán, Fidel Domínguez Álvarez and Juan Antonio Valle Valle. The list of those punished is completed by the close collaborator of the presidential couple, Néstor Moncada Lau, and the former Minister of Health, Sonia Castro.
Most of the fourteen sanctioned by the EU are already listed on other lists of punished by the Governments of Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the United States, which point them out of acts of corruption and violations of the human rights of Nicaraguans.
