AT THE SPECIAL MEETING OF THE PERMANENT COUNCIL TO ADDRESS THE SITUATION IN VENEZUELA

August 28, 2024 - Washington, DC

On this occasion, as we have done on all previous occasions, we would like once again to express our gratitude for the report presented by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in the person of its president, Roberta Clarke. We applaud and salute the professionalism and thoroughness of the work carried out.

We especially appreciate this very forceful report and the presentation of information with a dimension that transcends the moment and that concurs with the reports adopted over the past ten years by the universal human rights system, by the inter-American system, by Amnesty International, by Human Rights Watch, by various non-public human rights protection mechanisms in Venezuela, and by the OAS General Secretariat itself. But, in particular, we are grateful for this new report presented today by Roberta Clarke.

We have continued to work against that backdrop of systematic human rights violations and we have strengthened our contacts with the office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and we reiterate our request for indictments and arrest warrants against those with the greatest responsibility within the authoritarian Venezuelan regime, including the responsibility of the de facto president, the dictator Nicolás Maduro.

Against the backdrop of the accusations of crimes against humanity and systematic human rights violations established and showcased by the OAS General Secretariat’s Panel of Experts, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, reports from the IACHR and from civil society and various institutions, which have highlighted the need to attack the issue of extrajudicial executions, torture, forced disappearances, and political persecution in Venezuela.

We must activate the principle of complementarity, which, whenever invoked, seeks to resolve deficiencies in how justice functions in a country: in this case, the country concerned is Venezuela, where the conditions of impunity are constant and intractable.

The principle of complementarity seeks to provide certainty of justice — or at least the possibility of justice, when at present there is a certainty of impunity. The certainty of impunity that exists in Venezuela is what demands the activation of the principle of complementarity.

That certainty of impunity — which may arise from conditions of personal, economic, social, or criminal power — is enjoyed by those to whom the law does not apply, those for whom there is no investigation of the truth, and those who can repeat their crimes against humanity and their systematic violations of human rights. It exists when the constraints imposed by domestic and international law do not apply to certain people.

The principle is also triggered when the lack of institutional dynamics — or their weakness in dealing with certain persons or groups — gives rise to conditions of impunity and creates an absence of justice. Sometimes it arises from the country’s own institutional dynamics, where there is no separation of powers, where justice has been co-opted, where the enforcement of the law and the functioning of justice are arbitrary or authoritarian.
When institutions function in such a way, justice becomes a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it assures impunity for the perpetrators of crimes against humanity and systematic human rights violations; on the other, it allows the political persecution and repression of dissidents and opponents. And when the institutional framework of justice is instrumental in the enforcement of political imprisonment, justice becomes an essential part of the system of torture and forced or extrajudicial disappearances in such a political regime.

Yesterday, the last nail was hammered into a hermetically sealed coffin with the appointment of Diosdado Cabello as Minister of the Interior and Justice.

These are cases in which the principles of freedom and justice have lapsed, along with what should have been the State’s obligation to end impunity. But the entire justice system is designed to guarantee impunity, to guarantee impunity for those with the greatest responsibility within the regime, ensuring that forced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial executions, and other forms of persecution and political repression can continue. It therefore contradicts the law and the functioning of the international complementarity system to allow the administrators of justice to be instrumental in the regime’s policies of political persecution. This is a contradiction in its own legal terms, similar to the principle of complementarity when the military courts of the dictatorships in Uruguay and Argentina were expected, at the time, to provide truth and justice to victims and their next of kin.

Also bear in mind that from a human perspective, it is an aberration to force victims to expect justice from the accomplices or co-perpetrators or guarantors of the impunity enjoyed by those with the greatest responsibility within the regime. They are not going to judge their superiors — because the justice system acts in subordination — or themselves; they are not going to lay charges against their superiors or themselves; they are not going to request arrest warrants for their superiors or themselves.

The other aspect of complementarity is its temporal dimension. Since the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity and systematic human rights violations committed in 2014 enjoy impunity to this day, it is inevitable that we ask ourselves: How much longer than a decade must the victims and their families wait for justice? It would be legally nonsensical to wait that amount of time to apply the principle of complementarity for crimes against humanity, irrational to think that a wait of at least a decade was necessary to bring international charges for the crimes committed in the years following 2014 by those with the greatest responsibility within the Venezuelan regime, or to hold that a decade should be the minimum delay for bringing indictments for crimes against humanity.

The situation is that, while complementarity awaits, an ongoing series of crimes against humanity and systematic violations of human rights continues to be perpetrated, as has been documented today.

The passage of time clearly works only to the regime’s benefit: witnesses are killed or imprisoned, and evidence is erased in the broadest range of ways. In contrast, for the victims and their families, it means an eternity of domestic and international impunity for the perpetrators of acts of torture, forced disappearances, extrajudicial imprisonment, and political incarcerations. An eternity of absence of justice.

One element in the activation of the principle of complementarity is the prevention of new crimes against humanity and new systematic violations. In this case, prevention has failed completely. The figures for new political prisoners since the International Criminal Court’s Prosecutor first visited Caracas, the additional numbers since he opened his office, the rising total of cases of torture that have occurred, and how many new extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances have been carried out over that time are devastating.

At this juncture — when repression is intensifying, thousands of people have been jailed, and there are a hundred minors imprisoned — the principle of complementarity must be applied through indictments and arrest warrants, in order to ensure justice is done, since the commission of crimes has not stopped: on the contrary, it has increased.

The enforcement of the complementarity principle by the international justice system sometimes implies actions that should not be taken and others that are imperative: in this case, the prevention that was demanded by the context, with people who have been murdered, people who have been disappeared, and people who have been constantly tortured. And all that without justice, all that with impunity.

This request is made in the framework of the denunciation formulated by the reports of the General Secretariat’s Panel of Experts, the UN Human Rights reports, the reports of the inter-American system, and the reports issued by non-governmental organizations. It is time for the principle of complementarity to mean action instead of inaction. It is time for justice to be done.

Regrettably for Venezuela and the Venezuelans, we have had to repeat the warnings we have issued so many times over the past ten years. Regrettably, the regime has mocked and laughed, but it has proved us right over those ten years of action and denunciation. It has proved us right, as it has done so many times in the past.

The path of international justice is the path on which we will continue to insist, because the victims and their families, the victims of extrajudicial executions, the victims of torture, the disappeared, and the politically persecuted deserve justice. The victims have suffered years of repression and oppression, which continues under absolute domestic and international impunity. We must persevere in order to put an end to that impunity.

A month has passed since the election. It was an election that, for the regime, was defined by an absence of verification and a failure to present evidence. We have opposed the ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice; we have opposed the opaque actions of the National Electoral Council (CNE). To date, the CNE has still not published broken down results, but the opposition has done so. The openness of one contrasts with the opacity of the other, and the public system should respond to that.

As noted by the United Nations panel of experts, announcing an election result without publishing the details or providing the candidates with the tabulated results is unprecedented in democratic elections. This is obviously not a trustworthy result. Today, one month after the election, we can say that as far as the Venezuelan regime is concerned, everything remains unverified and undocumented: the votes are not documented, the tally sheets are not documented and are not verified, the cyber attack — or, between quotation marks, “cyber attack” — is not verified, the Court has issued no evidence or verification or proof to justify its ruling, and nothing has been audited. Absolutely nothing.
The work of the UN Mission and the work of the Carter Center must receive our special recognition. We wanted observation, and there it was: the reports are there. Are we going to look the other way from those reports? No, definitely not.

It would probably be absurd to expect the illegitimate Venezuelan Supreme Court to impart justice in the Venezuelan electoral process. It was absurd to expect it to act in accordance with the democratic rule of law, since that has not existed for quite some time. It was absurd to expect Venezuela’s CNE to hold free, fair, and transparent elections, or even — outside that framework — to have the minimum decency to rule on the results with the slightest sense of justice.

Nothing, absolutely nothing is verifiable in this Venezuelan electoral process, other than its absolute indecency.

We salute the Venezuelan people, who — even in the worst political, social, and economic conditions, suffering the worst humanitarian crisis in hemispheric history and the worst migratory crisis in hemispheric history — still have democratic instincts and continue to create democratic alternatives. People of Venezuela, you deserve my absolute respect.

Regrettably for you, we have had to repeat the warnings we have made so many times over the last ten years.

The OAS has always been the way to sustain democracy and has conducted several peaceful transitions. In our last remarks, we noted the cases of Guyana and Guatemala. Whenever it has been called upon to act, it has done so well. The OAS has more credibility in this regard than anyone else, has more achievements than anyone else, and it continues and will continue to address the issue of Venezuela, until such time as democracy is possible in the country. And we will also continue to walk the path of international justice. We will continue to insist on this instrument, because the victims and relatives of victims of all crimes against humanity deserve justice, because ten years of impunity is too much. Thank you, Mr. Chair.