The crime against Nicaragua’s stateless persons

On February 9, 2023, the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship released 222 political prisoners who had been subjected to torture and solitary confinement for several years at El Chipote and La Modelo prisons in Nicaragua, and sent them into exile in the United States. Among them there 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 2018 uprising 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 disembark from the plane chartered by USAID, back in Managua a judge at the Court of Appeals read a decree announcing that the 222 exiled individuals were “traitors to the homeland” and had been stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality, thus becoming stateless.

In reality, the spurious decree merely carried out the sentence anticipated by dictator Daniel Ortega in November 2021, when he proclaimed himself the winner in an electoral farce without political competition and virulently attacked the political prisoners in a national radio and television broadcast: “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 homeland!”

The use of statelessness as political persecution was rejected by most democratic nations in Latin America and Europe, and amid this general condemnation, the extraordinary political and humanitarian gesture of the government of Spain stood out, as the country which extended international protection to Nicaraguan “stateless persons” by offering them the possibility of acquiring Spanish nationality “by naturalization.”

A week after the first mass decree of “statelessness,” on February 15, 2023, the dictatorship carried out another act of revenge against 94 citizens, almost all of them exiles. In addition to declaring them “traitors to the homeland” without any trial or legal process, it ordered the illegal confiscation of all their assets. Once again, the Spanish government announced that its offer to stateless individuals to obtain Spanish nationality through a naturalization process was extended to the 94, and to “any Nicaraguan citizen who may become stateless in the future due to the decisions of the Daniel Ortega government.”

Spain’s solidarity marked a turning point in the international protection of stateless Nicaraguans. Between 2023 and 2026, the Spanish Cabinet granted Spanish nationality by naturalization to more than 135 Nicaraguans, while the regime exiled another 125 political prisoners to Guatemala, stripping them of their nationality.

According to the United Nations, more than 452 citizens like myself have been declared “stateless,” not including cases that were not published in a decree, or that were executed in secret trials, and many more who are prohibited from entering the country, are denied the right to renew their passports and identity documents, and are in a de facto stateless condition.

The “stateless” represent a cross-section of Nicaraguan society, which has been subjected to the crime of political persecution for opposing the dictatorship. They include bishops and priests of the Catholic Church, writers and public intellectuals, leaders and activists from across the political spectrum, unaffiliated “blue and white” citizens, student leaders, civic leaders, private business owners, producers and farmers, former FSLN guerrilla commanders, former officers of the National Army, independent journalists, human rights defenders, academics and former university rectors, 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 bribes in prison, nor has it been able to silence them in exile, nor quell their demands for democracy, freedom, and justice.

The mass promotion of statelessness in Nicaragua has far surpassed that of 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 selectively used this repressive tactic against their opponents. Criminal lawyer Reed Brody, known as “the dictator hunter,” a member of the UN Group of Experts on Human Rights in Nicaragua (GHREN), believes that “the large-scale use in Nicaragua of arbitrary deprivation of nationality as a mechanism of selective political repression is exceptional both in its scope and its systematic nature and constitutes a violation of numerous norms of international law, in particular the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, ratified by Nicaragua.”

Indeed, since the creation of GHREN in March 2022, its reports to the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly have called on the international community to have one or more States bring charges against Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice for violations of international conventions to prevent statelessness and torture, but to date no charges have been filed.

Spain’s gesture of international protection for stateless persons has been an important step, but insufficient to punish the crimes of the dictatorship, which remain unaddressed. There are at least four additional reasons that states should consider regarding the appropriateness of subjecting the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship to international justice:

The jurisprudence of the ICJ

The International Court of Justice is the only international forum whose jurisprudence is recognized by the rogue state of Ortega and Murillo. If Nicaragua invokes the ICJ’s 1986 ruling against U.S. external aggression, and other rulings in territorial boundary disputes with Honduras, Costa Rica, and Colombia, it cannot disregard the ICJ’s authority to hear any eventual accusation and conviction against it for violating the treaty to prevent statelessness.

The evidence and confession of Nicaragua

The decrees issued by the Managua Court of Appeals against the 222 and later 94 political prisoners in 2023, and the new constitution ratified in 2025 by the National Assembly, which elevates statelessness to constitutional status, constitute irrefutable proof of these crimes and the culpability of the State of Nicaragua. With this evidence in hand, it is reasonable and certain that a trial can be held in a short period of time and without significant costs.

The political significance of an ICJ ruling

An ICJ condemnation of Nicaragua for the crime of statelessness, in addition to exposing the political isolation of the regime’s leadership and sanctioning the State for violating an international agreement, would confirm the illegitimacy of the origin of the Ortega government, born from the electoral farce of 2021, as well as the illegitimacy of the “co-presidency” created in 2025 to benefit Ortega’s wife Rosario Murillo in order to legalize the “dynastic succession.”

An opportunity for international law

Finally, democratic states who are friends of Nicaragua in the Organization of American States and the European Union, could promote a trial and conviction of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship before the ICJ as an opportunity to inaugurate a political strategy based on international law and regional and multilateral cooperation, as an alternative to the forceful politics of the Donroe Doctrine. A conviction of the dictatorship at the ICJ could be the first step toward 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 to escape the dictatorship than to leave Nicaragua’s fate solely in the hands of Donald Trump’s transactional politics.

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