The UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) opened a case against the regime of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela to investigate the alleged electoral fraud in the elections last July and demanded that he keep the scrutiny records, as announced this Tuesday by a group of complainant lawyers.
One of the lawyers, Paulo Abrão, former executive secretary of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, confirmed to the news agency EFE that the Committee notified you today that it has opened your case and has issued several urgent provisional measures while investigating it, mainly preserve key electoral materials such as the vote count records.
Abrão is one of five lawyers from the Washington DC-based firm IHR Legal who reported to the Committee in October violations of massive electoral fraud, lack of transparency, restriction on voting abroad, obstruction of citizen control and suppression of access to justice in Venezuela.
The Committee’s notification indicates that it has “requested the State party to refrain from destroying the electoral material of the presidential elections” including the scrutiny minutes, and other documents necessary to prepare the totalization, adjudication and proclamation minutes” while investigating.
The lawyers said in a note that the opening of the case is a “crucial advance in the fight for democracy and human rights in Venezuela,” and that “It will probably conclude with a very significant and historic international decision that will confirm that Nicolás Maduro is not the elected president of Venezuela.”
In his complaint “violations of political rights are alleged to the detriment of an ordinary Venezuelan (non-candidate), a member of a group of millions of Venezuelan men and women whose human rights have been violated by the electoral fraud that Nicolás Maduro intends to carry out on January 10 2025″, they added.
That ordinary Venezuelan is one of the lawyers, Ignacio Álvarez Martínez, resident in the US, and who denounces a deprivation of the vote that is common to the rest of his fellow citizens abroad, of whom they estimate that 5.5 million are qualified to vote, that is, a quarter of the electorate.
In their complaint, the lawyers expose the situation in Venezuela before, during and after the July 28 elections, where they point out a “systematic pattern of ignorance of the popular will expressed in the vote, when the electoral results do not favor Nicolás Maduro and his allies.”
And, when requesting provisional measures, they influence “the imminent possibility of irreparable damage to human rights materializing”, since it is not “a typical case in which the electoral results are questioned by a candidate” but “a scandalous and very serious lack of knowledge of the result of an election.”
In this sense, they highlight that “despite the fact that 99% of the millions of Venezuelans living abroad were prevented from voting, the scrutiny records published by the opposition reveal that the incumbent government lost the elections by an overwhelming majority of those who did vote within Venezuela.”
The UN Human Rights Committee is a body of 18 independent experts that supervises the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by its State parties.
(With information from EFE)
