Liberal International continues to urgently call on the United Nations Human Rights Council to address Nicaragua’s accelerating democratic backsliding and persistent, serious violations of human rights. In this written statement LI focuses attention on the abolition of elections and the deepening of repression in Nicaragua. LI calls on the Nicaraguan authorities, the UN, and the broader international community to act with urgency and resolve to uphold human rights, defend democratic freedoms, and hold those responsible for violations to account.

See the full statement below

Liberal International submits this written statement ahead of the oral update of the Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (hereinafter, the Group), mandated by the Council under resolution 58/18. We regret to inform the Council that on every question it has asked the Group to examine, the situation has worsened since the presentation of the Group’s report to the sixty-first session.

On 19 July 2026, at a ceremony marking the forty-seventh anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, Daniel Ortega declared that elections would not be held in Nicaragua again and asserted that the opposition would never again have the opportunity to take power. The declaration was made without ambiguity, and it merits an unambiguous response from this Council. It is the culmination, rather than the beginning, of a long process: According to the Freedom House, Nicaragua has suffered the second-largest deterioration in political rights and civil liberties of any country since 2005, a decline of 49 points, and now scores 14 out of 100. The declared abolition of elections constitutes an open repudiation of Nicaragua’s binding obligations under Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as its commitments under the American Convention on Human Rights and the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which together guarantee the right to political participation and the obligation to hold genuine periodic elections as a cornerstone of democratic governance.

We draw the Council’s attention with particular sorrow to the death in custody of Mr. Brooklyn Rivera Bryan, Miskito leader and deputy of the National Assembly for YATAMA, who was 71 years of age when he was arrested on 23 September 2023. The Group has concluded that he died of enforced disappearance, after more than two years in State custody without contact with his family, without independent medical oversight and without any accountability, and that his enforced disappearance constitutes an international crime for which the Nicaraguan authorities bears legal responsibility, potentially amounting to murder, torture and persecution as crimes against humanity. Seven members of his family who sought to claim his remains were reportedly subjected to enforced disappearance in turn. His death is the most visible consequence of a wider pattern, in which the Group has documented 124 arbitrary detentions of Indigenous leaders, defenders and rangers between 2018 and 2024 and at least 46 Indigenous persons killed.

We are further alarmed by the dismantling of the legal profession itself. In July 2026 the Group found reasonable grounds to believe that lawyers are being systematically stripped of their licences, generally without notification, legal basis or hearing, many learning of the measure only when their names disappeared from the Supreme Court registry. This follows the purge of the judiciary since October 2023, in which eight magistrates left office and more than a thousand judicial employees were dismissed, and the 2025 reforms that reduced the judiciary to an “organ” coordinated by the presidency. A State that removes first the judges and then the advocates has abolished the right to a defence in substance, whatever its constitution may say.

The Group has found that gender-based violence has been used as a weapon of political repression against women, girls and LGBTIQ+ persons, and that the cancellation of nearly 300 women’s and LGBTIQ+ organizations destroyed essential spaces of protection, support and reporting. The structural findings of A/HRC/61/56 likewise remain wholly unaddressed: the systematic use of corruption to finance repression, and a coordinated intelligence and surveillance architecture directed at Nicaraguans in exile. The Ortega regime continues to refuse all engagement with the Group, which has now sent seventeen letters that remain unanswered.

Recommendations

Liberal International respectfully submits the following recommendations.

To the Nicaraguan authorities:

1. Reverse the announced abolition of elections and restore the right of the Nicaraguan people to elect their government through genuine, periodic and competitive elections.
2. Conduct an independent and transparent investigation into the death in custody of Mr. Brooklyn Rivera Bryan, including a forensic autopsy open to independent scrutiny; return his remains to his family without delay; and disclose the fate and whereabouts of the family members reportedly disappeared.
3. Release all persons arbitrarily deprived of liberty on political grounds, restore nationality to all those arbitrarily deprived of it, and cease all reprisals against relatives of persons in exile.
4. Reinstate the credentials of all lawyers and notaries removed without notice or hearing and restore the independence of the judiciary in law and in practice.
5. Grant the Group of Human Rights Experts and the Office of the High Commissioner unimpeded access to the country and respond to the Group’s outstanding communications.

To the Human Rights Council and its Member States:

6. Maintain and, where possible, deepen the Council’s scrutiny of Nicaragua, ensuring that the Group of Experts is resourced commensurately with the scale of what it is documenting.
7. Treat the destruction of the legal profession as an emergency for the right to a fair trial, and address it explicitly in statements, resolutions and bilateral engagement.
8. Protect Nicaraguans abroad from transnational repression, including by investigating surveillance, threats and attacks committed on their own territory, refraining from returning any person at risk, and ensuring that arbitrary deprivation of nationality does not leave individuals without effective protection.
9. Advance accountability through targeted measures against the officials the Group has identified, and through the initiation of proceedings in national jurisdictions where the requisite conditions of fair trial are met.
10. Withhold recognition of the current authorities as a legitimate democratic government, and condition diplomatic, financial and commercial engagement upon concrete steps towards the restoration of fundamental rights and of free and fair elections.