There is a key factor that is conspicuous by its absence in the pressures from the United States and Latin America for the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro allow a transition to democracy: that the International Criminal Court (CPI) issue an arrest warrant against him.
Several human rights organizations are losing patience and publicly asking whether the ICC is protecting Ripe.
The ICC, based in the Netherlands, has been investigating human rights violations of Ripe for several years. He opened a preliminary investigation into the crimes against humanity of Ripe in 2018, at the request of six countries, and turned it into an official investigation in 2021.
By comparison, it took the ICC just one year to investigate and issue an arrest warrant against Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for crimes committed during his 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
And it took ICC prosecutor Karim Khan just seven months to investigate and announce on May 20 that he will seek arrest warrants against Yahya Sinwar, the head of the Hamas terror group, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes committed after October 7, 2023. The ICC has yet to formally issue its arrest warrants for Sinwar and Netanyahu.
In the case of Venezuela, the ICC prosecutor has not even announced its intention to request Maduro’s arrest.
“The silence of prosecutor Karim Khan in the face of the crisis in Venezuela is alarming,” said Erika Guevara-Rosas, an official with the human rights group Amnesty International. “The current increase in the scale and gravity of the acts being committed against Venezuelans demands immediate action by the prosecutor.”
Separately, a group of more than a dozen former presidents of inter-American human rights institutions released a statement on August 12 urging the ICC to take immediate action against Maduro.
Santiago Cantón, secretary general of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists and former director of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, one of the signatories of the letter, told me that “there is an excess of patience, or naivety, on the part of the ICC prosecutor.”
The ICC prosecutor said on August 12 that his office is “actively monitoring” the situation in VenezuelaBut it is difficult to understand why the ICC prosecutor continues to expect that the courts controlled by Ripe take action against human rights violations in Venezuela.
In 2019, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that Maduro’s death squads were responsible for more than 7,000 extrajudicial killings in the previous 18 months.
Since the July 28 election, at least 23 people, including a 15-year-old boy, have been killed by regime officials, according to human rights groups. The Venezuelan regime has said more than 2,200 have been arrested since the election.
Former ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo says Khan’s recent statement could be a sign that the prosecutor is preparing to issue an arrest warrant against him. Ripe. Khan made similar warnings to Putin and Netanyahu shortly before ordering their arrests, and there is “a very high chance” that the prosecutor will do the same with RipeMoreno Ocampo said in an interview with CNN.
However, critics of the ICC say its decisions are often biased and erratic. The ICC prosecutor’s recent announcement of his intention to order the arrest of Netanyahu and Sinwar was described by US President Joe Biden as “outrageous.” There is no equivalence between Israel and the terrorist group that attacked it, Biden said.
If Khan issues an arrest warrant against Ripe In the coming days or weeks, as Moreno Ocampo believes, it will be a formidable tool to help pressure the Venezuelan dictator into accepting a negotiated transition to democracy, perhaps in exchange for some form of amnesty. But if Khan continues to do nothing, it will be a scandalous omission and a new stain on the image of the ICC.
© El Nuevo Herald. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
