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On February 9, 2023, the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship released 222 political prisoners who, for several years, had been subjected to torture and solitary confinement in the prisons of El Chipote and La Modelo in Nicaragua, and expelled them to the United States. Among those banished were seven opposition presidential pre-candidates who had been imprisoned five months before the November 2021 elections, as well as dozens of activists and civic leaders who supported the April 2018 uprising and took part in the national dialogue with the government. That effort was crushed by state repression and the imposition of a police state.
When the “flight to freedom” landed at Dulles Airport in Virginia and the released prisoners began to disembark from the OMNI airline plane chartered by USAID, in Managua an appeals court judge read out a decree announcing that the 222 were “traitors to the homeland” and had been stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality, rendering them “stateless.”
The crime of statelessness as a form of political persecution was rejected by most democratic nations in Latin America and Europe. Amid that broad condemnation, the extraordinary political and humanitarian gesture of the Spanish government stood out. It extended international protection to the Nicaraguan “stateless” by offering them the possibility of acquiring Spanish nationality through a special naturalization process known as “carta de naturaleza.”
One week after the first mass decree of “statelessness,” on February 15, 2023, the dictatorship carried out another act of retaliation against 94 citizens, almost all of them in exile. 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 the “stateless” to obtain Spanish nationality through naturalization would be extended to those 94 individuals, and to “any Nicaraguan citizen who in the future may be rendered stateless by decisions of the government of Daniel Ortega.”
Spain’s solidarity marked a turning point in the international protection of Nicaraguan “stateless” people. Between 2023 and 2026, Spain’s Council of Ministers granted Spanish nationality through naturalization to more than 135 Nicaraguans, while the regime expelled another 125 political prisoners to Guatemala, stripping them of their nationality.
According to the United Nations, more than 452 citizens have been declared “stateless,” not including cases that were never published in official decrees or were carried out through secret trials. Many more have been barred from entering the country, denied the right to renew their passports and identity documents, and are living in a condition of de facto statelessness.
The “stateless” reflect the full diversity of Nicaraguan society that has been targeted by the crime of political persecution for opposing the dictatorship. Among them are Catholic bishops and priests, writers and public intellectuals, leaders and activists from across the political spectrum, unaffiliated “blue and white” citizens, student leaders, civic leaders, private sector businesspeople, producers and farmers, former FSLN guerrilla commanders, former National Army officers, 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 confessions from them through torture or inducements in prison, nor silence them in exile, nor extinguish the demand for democracy, freedom, and justice.
The mass promotion of statelessness in Nicaragua has far exceeded that of the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina in the last century, and even the regimes of Cuba and Venezuela in the 21st century, which have used this repressive tactic more selectively against their opponents. Criminal lawyer Reed Brody, known as “the dictator hunter” and a member of the UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua, argues 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 the GHREN in March 2022, its reports to the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly have called on the international community for one or more states to bring a case against Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice for violations of international conventions aimed at preventing statelessness and torture. To date, however, no such case has been filed.
Spain’s gesture of international protection for the “stateless” has been an important step, but it is insufficient to hold the dictatorship accountable for crimes that remain in impunity. There are at least four additional reasons that states should weigh when considering whether to bring the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship before international justice:
The jurisprudence of the ICJ: The International Court of Justice is the only international forum whose jurisprudence Nicaragua itself has relied on. If Nicaragua invokes the ICJ’s 1986 ruling against the external aggression of the United States, as well as other decisions in territorial disputes with Honduras, Costa Rica, and Colombia, it cannot reasonably deny the Court’s authority to hear a case and potentially rule against it for violating the treaty on the prevention of statelessness.
The evidence and Nicaragua’s own admissions: The decrees issued by the Managua Court of Appeals against the 222 and the 94 in 2023, along with the new constitution ratified in 2025 by the National Assembly that elevates statelessness to constitutional status, constitute clear evidence of the commission of these crimes and of the responsibility of the Nicaraguan state. With this evidence available, it is reasonable to expect that a case could be carried out in a relatively short period of time and without excessive cost.
The political significance of an ICJ ruling: A ruling by the ICJ against Nicaragua for the crime of statelessness, beyond exposing the political isolation of the regime’s leadership and sanctioning the state for violating an international treaty, would confirm the illegitimacy of origin of the Ortega government, born from the sham 2021 election. It would also underscore the illegitimacy of the “co-presidency” established in 2025 with the elevation of Rosario Murillo in a move to formalize a dynastic succession.
An opportunity for international law: Finally, democratic states that are allies of Nicaragua within the OAS and the European Union and that promote a case and a ruling against the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship before the ICJ have an opportunity to open an alternative strategy to power-based doctrines, grounded instead in international law and regional and multilateral cooperation. A ruling against the dictatorship at the ICJ could be a first step toward building an international coalition to support a democratic transition in Nicaragua. There is no guarantee of success, but it is better to explore this path to end the dictatorship than to leave Nicaragua’s fate entirely in the hands of the transactional politics of Donald Trump.
This article was originally published in Spanish in El País.
