On February 9, 2023, the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship released 222 political prisoners that for several years they had been subjected to torture and solitary confinement in the El Chipote and La Modelo prisons in Nicaragua, and were exiled to the United States. Among those banished were the seven opposition presidential candidates, imprisoned five months before the November 2021 elections, and dozens of activists and civic leaders who supported the April rebellion in 2018 and participated in the national dialogue with the Government, which was crushed by state repression and the police state.
When the “freedom flight” landed at Dulles Airport in Virginia and the released prisoners began to leave the plane of the OMNI company, contracted by USAID, in Managua a judge from the Court of Appeals read a decree announcing that the 222 were “traitors to the country” and They had been stripped of their Nicaraguan nationalitybecoming “stateless”.
In reality, the spurious decree only carried out the sentence that the dictator Daniel Ortega anticipated in November 2021, when he proclaimed himself the winner in the electoral farce, without political competition, and on the national radio and television network he virulently attacked the political prisoners: “They are the sons of bitches of the Yankee imperialists,” he shouted, and ordered: “they should be taken to the United States, they are not Nicaraguans, they have no country!”
The crime of statelessness as political persecution was rejected by the majority of the democratic nations of Latin America and Europe, and in the midst of this general condemnation, the extraordinary political and humanitarian gesture of the Government of Spain stood out, which extended international protection to “stateless” Nicaraguansby offering them the possibility of acquiring Spanish nationality “by letter of nature.”
A week after the first massive decree of “statelessness”, on February 15, 2023, the dictatorship carried out another act of revenge against 94 citizens, almost all of them exiled, and in addition to declaring them “traitors to the country”, without any trial or legal process, ordered the illegal confiscation of all their assets. Once again, the Government of Spain announced that its offer to “stateless people” to obtain Spanish nationality through a naturalization process was extended to 94, and to “any citizen of Nicaragua who in the future may become stateless due to the decisions of the Government of Daniel Ortega.”
Spain’s solidarity marked a before and after in the international protection of “stateless” Nicaraguans. Between 2023 and 2026, Spain’s Council of Ministers granted Spanish nationality through naturalization to more than 135 Nicaraguans, while the regime banished another 125 political prisoners to Guatemala, stripping them of their nationality.
According to the United Nations, more than 452 citizens have been declared “stateless,” not including cases that were not published in a decree, or that were carried out in secret trials, and many more who are prohibited from entering the country, denied the right to renew their passports and identity documents, and are in a state of de facto statelessness.
The “stateless people” represent a sample of the plurality of Nicaraguan society that has been the object of the crime of political persecution for opposing the dictatorship. Among them, there are bishops and priests of the Catholic Church, writers and public intellectuals, leaders and activists from across the political spectrum, “blue and white” citizens without a party, student leaders, civic leaders, private businessmen, producers and peasants, former FSLN guerrilla commanders, former National Army officers, independent journalists, human rights defenders, academics and former university presidents, former diplomats, feminists, artists, evangelical pastors and former public officials. They also symbolize the moral defeat of a dictatorship that was never able to extract a confession from them under torture or handouts in prison, nor has it been able to silence them in exile, nor appease the demand for democracy, freedom and justice.
The mass promotion of statelessness in Nicaragua has far surpassed the military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina in the last century, and even the regimes of Cuba and Venezuela in the 21st century, which have used this repressive resource selectively against their opponents. Criminal lawyer Reed Brody, known as “the dictator hunter”, member of the UN Human Rights Group of Experts on Nicaragua (GHREN), considers that “the large-scale use in Nicaragua of the arbitrary deprivation of nationality as a mechanism of selective political repression is exceptional both in its scope and in its systematic nature and constitutes a violation of numerous norms of international law, in particular of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, ratified by Nicaragua.”
Indeed, since the creation of GHREN in March 2022, its reports before the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly have called on the international community for one or several States to appeal against Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice, for violation of international conventions to prevent statelessness and torture, but to date no accusation has been filed.
Spain’s gesture of international protection for the “stateless” has been an important step, but insufficient to punish the crimes of the dictatorship that remain unpunished. There are at least four additional reasons that States should weigh regarding the relevance of submitting the Ortega Murillo dictatorship to international justice:
The jurisprudence of the ICJ
The International Court of Justice is the only international forum whose jurisprudence recognizes the outlaw State of Ortega and Murillo. If Nicaragua vindicates the ICJ ruling in 1986 against the external aggression of the United States, and other rulings in territorial delimitation disputes with Honduras, Costa Rica and Colombia, it could not ignore the authority of the ICJ to hear a possible accusation and conviction against it, for violation of the treaty to prevent statelessness.
The evidence and confession of Nicaragua
The decrees issued by the Court of Appeals of Managua against the 222 and the 94 in 2023, and the new Constitution ratified in 2025 by the National Assembly that elevates statelessness to constitutional status, constitute reliable evidence of the commission of these crimes and the guilt of the State of Nicaragua. With the evidence in sight, it is reasonable and safe to carry out a trial in a short period of time and without great costs.
The political significance of an ICJ ruling
A conviction by the ICJ against Nicaragua for the crime of statelessness, in addition to exposing the political isolation of the regime’s leadership and sanctioning the State for the violation of an international agreement, would confirm the illegitimacy of origin of the Ortega Government, born from the electoral farce of 2021, and also the illegitimacy of the “co-presidency” installed in 2025 with the constitution of Rosario Murillo to legalize the “dynastic succession.”
An opportunity for international law
Finally, the democratic States, friends of Nicaragua in the OAS and the European Union, that promote a trial and conviction against the Ortega Murillo dictatorship before the ICJ, have the opportunity to inaugurate a political strategy, based on international law and regional and multilateral collaboration, as an alternative to the policy of force of the Donroe doctrine. A condemnation of the dictatorship at the ICJ may be the first step in convening an international alliance to support a democratic transition in Nicaragua. There is no guarantee of success, but it is better to explore this path out of the dictatorship than to leave the fate of Nicaragua, exclusively, in the hands of Donald Trump’s transactional politics.
*This article was originally published in The Country.
