Madrid. Through the Idea Group, a kind of non-profit association based in Florida, a group of 31 former presidents of Spain and Latin America, most of them from the ultra-liberal right, presented a complaint and a report to the International Criminal Court in The Hague against the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, whom they accuse of “crimes against humanity.” The person responsible for delivering the document and filing the complaint was the former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana.
The former presidents base their report on the document prepared by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which describes the events prior to and after the presidential elections of July 28 in Venezuela as “practices of state terrorism.” In addition, the former presidents, among whom are the Spaniards José María Aznar, Felipe González and Mariona Rajoy, and the Mexicans Felipe Calderón and Vicente Fox, warn the international prosecutor that “the crimes against humanity that have been carried out and continue to be carried out in a continuous line, including the recent arrest warrant against the actual president-elect, Edmundo González Urrutia, are the work of an operational military structure whose chain of command is directly exercised by Nicolás Maduro Moros, as an active military officer and as Commander-in-Chief.”
In the complaint filed, they also urge international justice to “in addition to its sanctioning function against members of the military chain responsible and in complaints filed by several Heads of State and the General Secretariat of the OAS itself, urgently deploy its same preventive function to stop the wave of widespread and systematic violations of human rights, crimes against humanity that are carried out through forced disappearances, extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detentions, torture and sexual violence.”
The signatories include former Latin American leaders such as Costa Rican Laura Chinchilla, Colombian Iván Duque, Uruguayan Julio Maria Sanguinetti and Ecuadorian Osvaldo Hurtado, among others.
Of the four living former Spanish presidents since the restoration of democracy in 1978, the only one who remained aloof from this dispute was the socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who also participated as an observer in the last elections in Venezuela and has always defended the cleanliness and proper functioning of the Venezuelan electoral system.
#presidents #Latin #America #Europe #file #suit #Maduro #Hague
– 2024-09-07 12:30:05
