One month and six days before the presidential change in Venezuela, andl United Nations Human Rights Committee (HR) opened an investigation against the Government for alleged fraud and lack of transparency in the elections on July 28 that officially gave Nicolás Maduro the winner. The opposition has claimed the victory at the polls of Edmundo González Urrutia, currently in exile and according to his own words, determined to return to Caracas on December 10. In the midst of the hardening of the Miraflores Palace towards its adversaries, the UN has asked the Venezuelan authorities to preserve what has not been exhibited as evidence by numerous countries: the scrutiny records.
Paulo Abrão, former executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), reported that the Venezuelan State has also been requested that, while the complaint is being investigated, “refrain from destroying electoral material of the presidential elections” as well as other documents “necessary to prepare the record of totalization, adjudication and proclamation.
The Human Rights Committee is a body of 18 independent experts that monitors the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by its States parties. With regard to Venezuela, it seeks to confirm the serious anomalies that existed before and after the conflict and were exposed by the lawyers who filed the complaint: on the one hand, the restriction on the voting of the millions of migrants dispersed throughout Latin America, the United States and Spain. After the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced Maduro’s victory without showing the evidence, the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) not only ratified what was done by that body, but also blocked any possibility of challenging the results or accessing an effective judicial remedy.
According to Abrão, the opening of a “pioneer” case in the matter like the Venezuelan one is a “crucial advance in the fight for democracy and human rights” in that country. He estimates that the investigation “will probably conclude” with a “very transcendent and historic” statement in which it will be stated that Maduro “is not the elected president” of that South American country.
Ignacio Álvarez Martínez, one of the lawyers who had filed the complaint and lives in the United States, maintained that the elections of July 28 showed a “systematic pattern of ignorance of the popular will” when the vote count did not favor the official candidate. . It was “a scandalous and very serious lack of knowledge of the result of an election.”
New context
The announcement comes amid increased tensions between the United States and Venezuela. In its final weeks in office, Joe Biden’s Government recognized González Urrutia as “president-elect” while the path has been opened in Congress to tighten economic sanctions. Madurismo responded with a law that punishes opponents who sympathize with these policies with up to 30 years in prison. María Corina Machado has already been accused of having committed the crime of “betrayal of the country.”
Ten days after Maduro begins his third and questioned presidential term, Donald Trump takes office in Washington. The appointment of Marco Rubio as Secretary of State predicts a higher level of confrontation with the Miraflores Palace. “Maduro is afraid of Trump,” Machado said.
In this context, the controversy has taken place between the Government and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, who last Monday had urged the authorities to allow the representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (Acnudh) expelled from Caracas to resume their work in the Venezuelan capital. Madurism described it as “worrying” that Khan “has not been informed” that the return of the OHCHR representatives was authorized in November. In its response to the prosecutor, the Government assured that In Venezuela there are no political prisoners, a statement considered offensive by human rights organizations.
