The dismantling of the rule of law and the general breakdown of the State are manifested in widespread human suffering, social violence and state policies of closure of freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, repression and persecution, arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial executions

Statement Feliciano Reyna Ganteaume Interactive Dialogue 41st Session of the Human Rights Council Geneva, July 5th, 2019 

Mr President, High Commissioner Bachelet, thank you for inviting me to this interactive dialogue, as part of a community of more than 200 human rights organisations, autonomous and independent, which for years have resisted State policies of restriction, intimidation and reprisals. 

High Commissioner, we value your report presented and your commitment to ensuring the human rights of millions of people in Venezuela, who can only rely international institutions to get the protection and access to justice which they do not get in Venezuela. We extend this recognition to the staff of your Office who have rigorously and extensively monitored and documented human rights violations in Venezuela. 

For years, Venezuelan civil society has made a titanic effort to raise international awareness regarding the reality of human rights violations suffered by the Venezuelan people. For more than a decade, the government did not report to United Nations bodies, denounced the American Convention on Human Rights, failed to comply with the rulings of the Inter-American Court, or authorized requests for visits from independent mandates and the Inter-American Commission. 

Since 2013, treaty bodies, special procedures, the Inter-American Commission, among others, have issued recommendations to correct persistent human rights violations, that the government ignored. As of 2015, this breach led to a Complex Humanitarian Emergency, which is still denied by Mr. Nicolás Maduro ́s government, and on which most United Nations agencies on the ground kept silent. 

It is complex because it originates from political factors that undermined the structures of the state, the economy and the well-being of the population. It is an emergency because, due to the collapse of structures, the majority of the population is subjected to a systemic human rights violation. And it is humanitarian because internal capacities to ensure even minimum living conditions collapsed, creating a massive scale of humanitarian needs, which we estimate affects more than 10 million people within Venezuela, and created the largest refugee crisis in Latin American history. 

Mr President, 

The dismantling of the rule of law and the general breakdown of the State are manifested in widespread human suffering, social violence and state policies of closure of freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, repression and persecution, arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial executions, to punish those who exercise their rights, including political dissenters and deputies of the National Assembly, many of them arbitrarily detained, persecuted or in exile. These abuses, reflected by the Office of the High Commissioner, are part of a systematic practice. 

In Venezuela there are no independent institutions that can put limits to abuses of power, with the exception of the National Assembly, elected in December 2015, whose constitutional powers have been annulled by the Supreme Court of Justice, controlled politically, and by a fraudulent constituent assembly. Judges and prosecutors are mostly officials without stability, subject to free appointment and removal, without cause or appeal. 

Extreme poverty and massive deprivation in food, health, education, clean water, electricity and transport affect particularly women, babies, children and adolescents, the elderly, persons with disabilities and chronic health conditions, indigenous peoples and detainees. Its most serious effects are malnutrition of children and pregnant women; depletion of medicines and loss of public health services; the forced absence of children and adolescents from the education system; and thousands of people who flee daily to preserve their lives. 

This human rights crisis is also rooted in great corruption. Since 1999, oil export revenues have generated more than $940 billion; however, the sustained decline in gross domestic product has led us to levels of 70 years ago, and to a relentless hyperinflation that compromises people ́s own existence. Therefore, international sanctions against sectors of an economy in such a degree of collapse will exacerbate the effects of the emergency on the Venezuelan people. 

Mr President, in view of these facts, we ask the Human Rights Council: 

1. To designate at the next Session an International Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Violations in Venezuela, to establish responsibilities and prevent impunity.

2. To urge the host States of forced migrants and refugees from Venezuela to unify policies and practices that provide them with true international protection.

3. To accelerate a political solution to the Venezuelan crisis, articulating national and international efforts, such as the Oslo talks, including strong actions by the UN Secretary-General, together with the High Commissioner for Human Rights, in order to restore the rights to political and electoral participation of Venezuelans. 

Likewise, to urge Mr. Maduro’s government, with the proper supervision of an independent international body, to: 

1. Implement the agreements established with the High Commissioner and facilitate the establishment of a permanent office in Venezuela.

2. Ensure the work of human rights defenders, journalists, humanitarian actors, trade unionists, health personnel and other human rights activists.

3. Recognize the emergency and fully open the humanitarian space, to implement a response commensurate with the severity and scale of the emergency.

4. To terminate the Constituent Assembly and respect the legitimate functioning of the National Assembly, as well as take measures to restore the rule of law and an independent and impartial justice system.

5. Comply with all recommendations from human rights protection bodies and speed up visits already requested by the Special Procedures.

6. Immediately end practices of torture that have been reported in various detention centres, and enforced disappearances, as well as repression in demonstrations that are causing loss of life and other irreparable human harm. 

Concluding remarks 

Mr President and members of the Council, 

To live in Venezuela today is to wait hours or days to get gasoline and not have public transport. Cities and towns have no electric service even for weeks, with temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius. It means trying to survive on a minimum wage of $6 a month, when a family of 5 people would need $400 a month, only in food. For most living in extreme poverty, it means choosing which of the children will go to school, because only one will have fed. The others would be part of the million children who have had to quit school. Maybe there was no class because the teacher fainted, also from hunger. Perhaps these children would be with Grandma, as part of the 800,000 children left behind, because their parents have been forced to migrate to survive. And Grandma could barely support them because she would be one of the 7 million people who do not get their medicines. 

If you went to a public hospital, you would not be granted access so that information about the precarious situation would not come out. You would know that in just two years 30% of those who needed dialyzing died, that most of the 5 thousand people with hemophilia already have irreparable and disabling damages from lack of clotting factors, that 4 thousand women with breast cancer no longer have access to medicines for their treatment cycles and that 70,000 people with HIV went more than two years without antiretrovirals. 

In mining areas, you would see immense environmental damage impacts that have destroyed productive and hydrological sources. You would know of indigenous communities whose ancestral lands have been intervened and controlled by mafias that include military. You would know that there are no medicines to preserve health and life and that the laws to protect their rights were only good on paper. 

And in expressing dissent, because this is no way to live with dignity, because there is no protection against gender-based violence, if you demanded LGBTI rights or protested for lack of food, water and medicine, you would be the subject of State policies of repression that have severed hundreds of lives, caused irreparable injuries to the physical integrity of thousands, and caused profound social trauma. 

Mr President, High Commissioner Bachelet, 

Serious human rights violations in Venezuela must now be stopped and corrected because the emergency is getting worse. Mr. Maduro’s government has shown that it does not want and no longer has the capacity to solve the human drama that is unfolding in plain sight of the international community. Let us not allow Venezuela to be another protracted crisis, adding millions more victims to those who already challenge us as a human rights community from different regions of the world. 

Thank you, Mr. President, Thank you so much, High Commissioner Bachelet