By Benedict Mander in Maracaibo
Financial Times:
The concentration of power under Hugo Chávez has jeopardised judicial independence, media freedom, and civil and political rights in Venezuela, according to Human Rights Watch.
The US-based campaign group details in a report published on Tuesday what it describes as the pernicious impact of an increasingly powerful executive as well as the weakening of democratic institutions and human rights guarantees.
“For years, President Chávez and his followers have been building a system in which the government has free rein to threaten and punish Venezuelans who interfere with their political agenda,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch.
“Today that system is firmly entrenched, and the risks for judges, journalists, and rights defenders are greater than they’ve ever been under Chávez,” said Mr Vivanco, who was expelled from Venezuela in 2008 immediately after the release of the rights group’s previous report, which described Mr Chávez’s first 10 years in power as a “lost decade”.
The latest report, entitled Tightening the Grip: Concentration and Abuse of Power in Chávez’s Venezuela, shows how the situation has since then become “even more precarious”.
Government supporters have criticised the group’s reports of being incomplete and biased. Officials have also accused Human Rights Watch – an independent, non-governmental organisation that says it does not accept any government funds, directly or indirectly – of being financed by the US government. That is despite also having been strongly critical of the Colombian government, especially during the rightwing administration of former president Álvaro Uribe, a close Washington ally.
Nevertheless, the report could strain Venezuela’s already frail relations with the US, which Mr Chávez likes to call the “Yankee empire”, something that plays well with supporters whose votes he is campaigning for ahead of presidential elections due on October 7.
Barack Obama, US president, told a Spanish-language television station in an interview last week that Mr Chávez’s actions over recent years had not had a serious impact on national security, prompting presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to describe his comments as “stunning and shocking”. On Friday, Mr Chávez dismissed suggestions that he posed any danger.
However, Human Rights Watch charges that although many Venezuelans remain openly and often stridently critical of their socialist leader, the prospect of facing reprisals “has undercut the ability of judges to adjudicate politically sensitive cases, and forced journalists and rights defenders to weigh the consequences of disseminating information and opinions critical of the government.”
The report singles out certain cases that it considers to be particularly serious, such as the prosecution in December 2009 of the judge María Lourdes Afiuni, who is still awaiting trial, after Mr Chávez called her a “bandit” and publicly urged that she be given a 30-year prison sentence because she had granted conditional liberty to a prominent government critic after almost three years in prison without trial.
Human Rights Watch makes various recommendations for the government, including that it restore the credibility of the supreme court with a ratification process for all judges appointed after a 2004 court-packing law, and recognising the authority of the Inter-American human rights system.
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