3/3/2025 Nicaragua (International Christian Concern) — After consolidating power in the presidency earlier this year, Nicaragua withdrew Friday from the U.N. Human Rights Council. Two days earlier, a group of U.N. experts released a strongly worded report rebuking President Daniel Ortega’s regime for its systematic crackdown on human rights, democratic norms, and religious groups.
“We are seeing the methodical repression of anyone who dares to challenge Ortega and Murillo’s grip on power,” said Ariela Peralta, an expert who contributed to the report. “This is a government at war with its own people.”
As part of the recent consolidation of power, Ortega announced his wife, Rosario Murillo, as co-president. He has since brought the legislative and judicial branches under his authority.
The Ortega regime claims that the U.N. and the Organization of American States, both of which have issued opposed Nicaragua’s crackdown on religious groups, are part of an international smear campaign against it. According to Reuters, Murillo denounced the U.N. report as “falsehoods” and “slander.”
Though thousands of nongovernmental organizations have lost their legal status due to a murky 2018 law on funding, the Catholic church has been particularly targeted due to its outspoken criticism of the regime’s sordid human rights record and its decision to shelter student protestors in 2019.
The U.S. Department of State added Nicaragua to the Special Watchlist (SWL) of countries with particularly severe violations of religious freedom in 2019, a designation that continued until 2022 when it was raised to the Countries of Particular Concern (CPC) list. The latter designation indicates increased concern about the state of religious freedom in Nicaragua and normally carries with it certain legislatively mandated consequences in the form of sanctions.
“Catholic clergy and laity continued to experience government harassment,” said a U.S. State Department publication, citing media reports, “including slander, arbitrary investigations by government agencies based on charges that clergy and laity said were unfounded, withholding of tax exemptions, and denial of religious services for political prisoners.”
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) similarly began including Nicaragua in its report in 2020, recommending that it be added to the SWL then and upgrading its recommendation to the CPC list in 2023.
Arguing for its CPC recommendation in its most recent annual report, USCIRF noted that “religious freedom conditions in Nicaragua worsened significantly” over the previous reporting period. “The government of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo intensified its efforts to arbitrarily arrest, imprison, and expel Catholic clergymen and laypeople. The government also canceled the legal status of Catholic organizations, confiscated their property, and harassed and intimidated worshipers.”
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