42nd Session of the UN Human Rights Council
Joint statement on Nicaragua's adoption of Universal Periodic Review on Human Rights
Red Local and CIVICUS welcome the government of Nicaragua's engagement with the UPR process.
However, our joint UPR submission documents that since its previous review Nicaragua has not implemented any of the 26 recommendations it received relating to civic space, 17 of which concern freedom of expression and access to information. We also regret that during the current cycle, recommendations regarding the provision of access to and cooperation with regional and international human rights mechanisms, the investigation of human rights abuses perpetrated against demonstrators, and the safety and freedom of jailed journalists and HRDs were not accepted by the government.
As detailed in our submission, Nicaraguan legislation still treats slander and insult as criminal offences, and the freedom of the press continues to be limited by the manipulated allocation of official advertising, denial of access to cover government activities, tight control of the flow of information from the top of the state apparatus, and media concentration in the hands of the presidential family and their allies. Acts of explicit censorship have also been recorded.
As also documented in our submission, legislation regulating the establishment, operations and dissolution of CSOs is applied arbitrarily, with the aim of hindering and intimidating the staff of independent CSOs, which have also been affected by legal or de facto restrictions on receiving external funding and sustaining international collaboration. Land rights defenders, women’s and LGBTI rights activists, journalists and bloggers are also routinely stigmatised, harassed, criminalised, arbitrarily arrested and physically attacked.
The exercise of freedom of peaceful assembly is subjected to de facto and legal barriers, from authorisation requirements to hold demonstrations and a Sovereign Security Law that broadly defines security threats to criminalise common tactics of protest movements, to the illegal use of excessive and deadly force against demonstrators, which between April and August 2018 resulted in at least 300 people killed.
We call on the Government of Nicaragua to take proactive measures to address these concerns and implement recommendations to create and maintain, in law and in practice, an enabling environment for civil society.