Rights Council Report on Venezuela Can Play a Crucial Role

We welcome the High Commissioner’s oral update on the situation in Venezuela, the first of its kind, and look forward to the report to be presented in June. In this vein, we’d like to highlight some areas where the UN High Commissioner’s upcoming report could play an important role to curb abuses in Venezuela. Among other areas, the upcoming report on Venezuela’s crisis should cover the ongoing crackdown on dissent, the devastating food and medicine shortages, and the resulting refugee crisis. In a recent report by Human Rights Watch and Foro Penal, we analyzed cases in which intelligence agents were detaining and torturing members of the military who are suspected of fomenting rebellion. In some cases, they also went after their families or other civilians when they couldn’t find the suspects; in most cases, intelligence agents carried out the arrests. Recently, security agents and armed pro-government groups have again used excessive force against demonstrators, leaving dozens of people killed and many more injured. More…