From April 2018 to March 2024, the UN panel of experts found “73 cases of arbitrary arrests of members of the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations,” although it said that “the total figure could be higher.”
A group of UN experts denounced that the Nicaraguan regime maintains “systematic” attacks against the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations, according to an update published in March of the report of the Human Rights Council to which the AFP had access on Tuesday.
The document notes that “systematic and widespread violations and abuses of international human rights law” committed against clergy continue to be documented.
Experts recorded at least “63 new cancellations of the legal personality of non-profit organizations” between January and March 2024, including 23 of a religious nature.
In early July, Nicaragua’s dictatorship canceled the legal personality of Catholic Radio María, among others oenegés, and confiscated its assets, arguing that it did not report the origin of its income.
Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, argue that the Church supported protests against the 2018 regime that left more than 300 dead according to the UN and that both considered a coup attempt sponsored by Washington. Murillo has described the religious as “sons of the devil” or “agents of evil” who perform “spiritual terrorism.”
From April 2018 to March 2024, the UN panel of experts found “73 cases of arbitrary arrests of members of the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations,” although it said that “the total figure could be higher.”
The victims include priests, pastors and members of evangelical churches, seminarians, secular people who carried out journalistic or artistic work in defense of human rights in religious and parishioner organizations, the report said in the update of the report.
The report describes as “crimes against humanity” the arrests and imprisonments, “cruel, inhuman or degrading torture or treatment,” the expulsions of critical Nicaraguans or the “arbitrary” dispossession of nationality.
By the end of 2023, about 30 clerics were imprisoned and then sent to the Vatican.
United Nations experts pointed out that both Ortega and Murillo have “individual criminal responsibility” to use the state to “systematically suppress” religious.
This article has been translated after first appearing in Diario EL Mundo