Brussels, March 2. The European Union (EU) is considering the possibility of offering specific protection to human rights activists who are among the Nicaraguans deported by the regime of Daniel Ortega, a senior community official said Thursday.
“We are actively studying the possibilities of providing urgent support to the 222 deportees (…) We are in particular studying the possibility of prioritizing human rights defenders within this group of 222 and the 94 who were already at the outside the country,” said Deputy Director for the Americas of the European External Action Service (EEAS), Duccio Bandini.
Bandini, who took part in a session of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the countries of Central America, spoke of the 222 Nicaraguan political prisoners who were released and exiled on February 9 and whose nationality was revoked.
Six days later, the country’s authorities stripped 94 other Nicaraguans of their nationality, including clerics, former officials, human rights defenders, Sandinista dissidents, opponents, journalists and students.
“We have specific instruments to support human rights defenders and civil society in exile. We are looking at how these instruments can be used quickly to support these specific people,” Bandini continued.
The EU welcomed the release of these prisoners “who should never have been imprisoned”, he stressed, and recalled that it also thanked Spain for its offer to grant them citizenship. .
In any case, this head of the Community diplomatic service specified that it was necessary “to continue to condemn in the harshest terms a repression which is intensifying against all forms of protest and opposition and which continues to show violations both of the Constitution and of the international commitments adopted by Nicaragua”.
While maintaining his openness to a possible dialogue, he clarified that the EU reiterates to the Nicaraguan authorities that they “repeal the legislation that violates human rights and persecution” and that they return to “full respect”. freedoms of assembly, association, expression, religious beliefs or any other type of thought.
“We continue to believe that the resumption of an inclusive dialogue between the government and the opposition, the restoration of genuine democracy, in accordance with the commitments made by the authorities in March 2019, continues to be the only constitutional way to resolve the political problem. , economic and in Nicaragua,” concluded Bandini.
Former guerrilla commander Dora María Téllez, a former comrade in arms of Ortega, also affected by the government’s deportation of these people to the United States, also participated in the parliamentary hearing.
“We are all dealing with work permits, with health difficulties,” Téllez told MEPs by videoconference, while detailing the economic difficulties they are going through and the physical and mental consequences caused by the time spent at home. the prison of El Chipote, in Managua.
Téllez pointed out that “there are prisoners who see that their families are in danger, that they are threatened” and whose members do not obtain authorization from the authorities to leave the country.
He denounced that the “political” police are “totally instrumentalized for repression”, but considered that the sign that the regime “did not know how to manage the pressure” is that it had to release political prisoners.
For his part, the presidential candidate Félix Maradiaga, who is also one of the 222 exiles, asked that the resolutions that the European Parliament has just approved in favor of a democratic Nicaragua be implemented by the Community executive “ so that the regime accepts a civic, peaceful solution.
This solution, he said, involves “the release of all political prisoners and the restoration of human rights in Nicaragua”.
Nicaragua has been going through a political and social crisis since April 2018, which worsened after the controversial general elections of November 7, 2021, in which President Daniel Ortega was re-elected for a fifth term, fourth consecutive and second with his wife. , Rosario Murillo, as vice-president, with her main suitors in prison or in exile. EFE
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