The OAS will present a new report on human rights violations in Venezuela

Next Wednesday the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States (OAS) will present a new report on the alleged commission of crimes against humanity by the Chavista regime in Venezuela.

The report, prepared by the OAS Special Advisor on Responsibility to Protect, Jared Genser, is based on the 2018 report of the OAS Independent Expert Group, which compiled a large amount of evidence that it was established that there was reasons to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed in Venezuela, especially between 2016 and 2017.

“Since then, the abuses have continued and the alleged crimes have increased in scale and depth, affecting millions of Venezuelans.“Said the agency

If the conclusions drawn are confirmed, the document would come to a conclusion in line with that of the United Nations Investigative Mission in Venezuela., which in September ruled that rights violations “amount to crimes against humanity”. On 6 October, the United Nations Human Rights Council extended the mandate of investigators who documented executions, disappearances and torture in the Caribbean country for two years.

The OAS report will also emphasize “the impact of the ICC prosecutor’s inaction” regarding the crisis. Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Chile, Paraguay and Peru have denounced Venezuela before the International Criminal Court, asking the Public Prosecutor’s Office to open an investigation into the matter.

The international organization opened two preliminary exams in 2018 and 2020 in relation to the reported events, but The Attorney General, Fatou Bensouda, did not formalize the investigation to turn it into a formal case. For the OAS, this passivity occurred “by encouraging the regime to commit more crimes, in the belief that it can act with total impunity”.

Bensouda stated this earlier this month believes that there are “good reasons to believe” that crimes against humanity have occurred in Venezuela. The Prosecutor’s Office of the International Criminal Court asked Venezuela for information on “relevant internal procedures and their compliance with the requirements of the Rome Statute”, the founding statute of the international tribunal.

The ICC is a court of last resort and is governed by the principle of complementarity. In other words, it would not intervene if the Venezuelan justice carried out authentic investigations into the facts under investigation. If the International Tribunal’s Prosecutor’s Office finds that these investigations are not genuine and that the reported facts are serious enough, the preliminary examination would become a formal investigation. In this final stage, ICC investigators could travel to Venezuela to expand the investigation or request judges to issue arrest warrants..

In November, Chavista prosecutor Tarek William Saab traveled to The Hague to try to prevent the ICC from moving to the next stage of the judicial process. However, Bensouda told him that he had already done so.

The OAS presentation will be led by Genser, who will detail the report’s findings and recommendations. In addition, the event will include speeches by the Secretary General, Luis Almagro, and the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, Michelle Bachelet’s predecessor.

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