The Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered Nicaragua on Tuesday to adopt provisional measures in favor of 115 opposition members due to the country’s “non-compliance” and “persistent contempt” of the court’s previous rulings. “The position assumed by Nicaragua and the disregard for the orders” in prior rulings “constitutes a persistent contempt of the binding nature of the decisions made by this court,” stated the IACHR in a resolution.
The continental court, based in San José, decided to maintain the provisional measures previously ordered in favor of 115 opposition members, 105 of whom were expelled from the country and stripped of their nationality. Since February 2023, the government of Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, has already stripped about 450 politicians, businesspeople, journalists, intellectuals, human rights activists, and religious figures of their nationality and expelled them from Nicaragua.
“Such deportation (…) could place the beneficiaries who were deported at extreme risk of suffering irreparable harm to their rights,” argued the court. Among those affected are the exiled Nicaraguan journalist Juan Sebastián Chamorro; the former presidential candidate exiled in the United States, Félix Maradiaga; former guerrilla commander Dora María Téllez; and Bishop Rolando Álvarez.
The Ortega government has intensified repression since the opposition protests of 2018, which left more than 300 dead in three months, according to the UN, and were deemed by Managua as a Washington-led coup attempt. Recently, it reformed the Constitution to consolidate power by extending the presidential term from five to six years and creating a presidency composed of a “co-president” and “co-presidentess” to “coordinate” the other branches of the state.
The IACHR also called for the release of nine individuals currently imprisoned in Nicaragua, ensuring they receive proper health care and food, and allowing them access to family and lawyers until their release. It also summoned Nicaragua to a public hearing “on the implementation of the provisional measures issued in favor of the beneficiaries” at the court’s headquarters in San José on February 4, 2025.
Ortega, a 79-year-old former guerrilla who governed Nicaragua in the 1980s following the Sandinista revolution, has remained in power since 2007 after three re-elections, the most recent in 2021, in elections with the opposition either imprisoned or in exile.
