A UN body has accused the “alarming” increase in forced disappearances in the period leading up to the elections in Venezuela. In a statement issued in Geneva this Tuesday, the Working Group on Enforced Disappearances highlighted that this trend has been registered since December 2023 and affects the right to freedom of expression and participation in public affairs.
Elections are scheduled to take place in July. But the UN, the American government and even President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sounded a warning about the conditions for the opposition’s participation.
Now, the new warning increases the pressure and points out that “the majority of those forcibly disappeared are members of the main opposition political party and military personnel”. Nicolas Maduro’s government did not respond to the accusations.
“As the country prepares for the presidential elections in July 2024, these forced disappearances could have a dissuasive effect and impede people’s right to vote freely”, warned the Working Group’s experts.
“These prolonged and incommunicado detentions amount to forced disappearances. They appear to follow a pattern in which people are deprived of their liberty by state authorities, taken to recognized detention centers and there deprived of their fundamental rights, such as contact with the world abroad and access to a lawyer,” said the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.
“Depriving a person of his liberty, followed by a refusal to acknowledge his detention, or concealing his fate or whereabouts, places him outside the protection of the law. This constitutes an enforced disappearance, regardless of the duration of such deprivation of liberty or concealment” , declared the body, formed by experts Aua Baldé, Gabriella Citroni, Angkhana Neelapaijit, Grażyna Baranowska and Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez.
