Judges and prosecutors in Venezuela have played a significant role in serious rights violations against government opponents, UN investigators said Thursday, slamming a dire lack of judicial independence in the country.
In their second report, a team tasked with probing the rights situation in Venezuela detailed how deficiencies in the justice system were responsible for serious violations, including allowing torture to continue with impunity.
“Amid Venezuela’s profound human rights crisis, the independence of the judiciary has become deeply eroded, jeopardising its role in imparting justice and safeguarding individual rights,” said Marta Valinas, who chairs the fact-finding mission.
The team was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2019 to probe a slew of alleged violations in the crisis-wracked country, where President Nicolas Maduro faces accusations of cracking down on dissent.
“Our latest investigation found reasonable grounds to believe that, under intensifying political pressure, judges and prosecutors have… played a significant role in serious violations and crimes against real and perceived opponents committed by various state actors in Venezuela,” Valinas said in a statement.
The team’s report — based on interviews and analysis of 183 detentions of real or perceived government opponents between 2014 and last month — found that public officials had been permitted to commit violations and crimes with impunity.
– ‘Devastating consequences’ –
Among the cases reviewed were male and female detainees subjected in 2020 to short term enforced disappearance, torture, including sexual violence and “arbitrary deprivation of life”.
The investigators said they found no evidence of high-level officials being probed or prosecuted in those cases or in any others it has investigated since.
This includes high-profile cases where charges have been brought and that have been pointed to by authorities as evidence of progress by the judicial system, they said.
The report referred to the case of opposition leader Fernando Alban, who fell to his death from the 10th floor while detained by the national intelligence service.
The team found the charges were “highly limited in scope and/or focused on isolating low-level perpetrators, as opposed to seeking accountability further up the chain of command”.
Mission member Francisco Cox said “the overwhelming majority” of violations targeting government opponents that had been previously documented by the team had “not resulted in thorough investigations, prosecutions and convictions of all those allegedly responsible.”
The investigators also found that prosecutors had submitted information tainted by torture which judges admitted as evidence against defendants.
In some cases, judges ordered alleged torture victims, sometimes bearing visible injuries, be returned to the same detention facility where they said the abuse occurred.
The judges’ actions and omissions had “devastating consequences on victims, including continued torture,” the report said.
© Agence France-Presse
