Matagalpa Nicaragua. Image by Since 2018, the Ortega-Rosario Murillo government in Nicaragua has used multiple repressive strategies to punish citizens who have expressed political dissent, such as persecution, harassment, imprisonment, torture, confiscation of property, and extrajudicial executions.
In 2023, state authorities used a new modality for the first time to increase repression: stripping opponents of their nationality.
Reed Brody, a member of the UN Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (GHREN), said in a statement to Confidencial in a recent interview:
The GHREN published a report at the end of February 2025 detailing the main patterns of violations committed by Nicaragua’s repressive apparatus, which include denationalizations.
The report is key because it also identifies institutions and people responsible for carrying out this strategy, including the military, the police, the judiciary, the legislature, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of the Interior.
“In the absence of a court order, the deputy minister of the interior decides who to deprive of their nationality (…) in consultation with the vice president,” the report details.
Since 2023, a reform in the Nicaraguan Constitution establishes that “traitors to the homeland lose their Nicaraguan nationality,” a legal maneuver that has been widely questioned by constitutional experts. It also allows the confiscation of their assets.
To date, 452 people are known to have been stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality by the Ortega-Murillo government by judicial order: 358 of them were already arbitrarily detained for political reasons and deported to the United States, Guatemala, and Rome (the Vatican), and 94 were free, though most of them were already in exile.
Statelessness is the legal dissociation of a person from the state of origin. Salvador Marenco, advocacy officer for the Colectivo de Derechos Humanos Nicaragua Nunca Más (Human Rights Collective Nicaragua Never Again), an NGO made up of Nicaraguan human rights defenders working in exile, explained to Global Voices.
The above implies that the person “cannot demand any protection from the state, cannot exercise his or her rights within the territory, such as the right to work, to housing, or to legal personality,” which translates into civil and economic death.
In addition, they lose other ties with the country, with the rupture of social, family, cultural, and even environmental relations.
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De facto stateless
However, the number of stateless persons could be much higher, as there are also de facto stateless people. These are people who have not gone through a judicial process or whose announcement of denationalization was not made publicly but suffer the same consequences of statelessness.
Marenco pointed out to Global Voices that his collective registered many cases in which people were not in exile but “were in Nicaragua and forced to leave, or were abroad for personal, work, or touristic reasons, and were not allowed to enter the country,” rendering them stateless in practice.
This group of statelessness falls into three categories: people whose personal documentation such as birth certificates or passports were denied renewal by the state, others who have been individually banished, and Nicaraguans who were denied entry into their own country.
The latter group now includes hundreds of people whose profiles are no longer those of opponents or critics of the regime. The denial of entry to the country “is no longer selective and is now applied on a massive scale,” explains Marenco.
Many of these people are in the United States, where they traveled with a humanitarian parole permit that was just revoked by US President Donald Trump.
Hundreds of Nicaraguans are in a serious situation of uncertainty, with increasing restrictions in the United States, the threat of deportations, and the impossibility of returning to their country of origin.
International justice mechanisms
Despite the limitations on obtaining justice that exist within Nicaragua, there is hope that international courts may help. For example, there is a petition pending at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a case before the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and a door is open for another country to present a lawsuit against Nicaragua before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), based in The Hague.
The Never Again Collective has taken various actions to access justice. In 2023, in conjunction with other organizations, they filed a collective petition with the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights representing 39 people who had been stripped of their Nicaraguan nationality due to human rights violations.
This lawsuit is currently pending, and it is expected that the case will be brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, but it might take years.
The collective also works closely with other international organizations that participate in United Nations mechanisms. These include spaces dedicated to civil society in the Human Rights Council and providing information to the Universal Periodic Review of Nicaragua.
A prominent case at the international level is that of Azahalea Solís, who went to the United Nations Human Rights Committee to report the Nicaraguan State, with the aim of establishing new routes of complaint and with the hope of setting a precedent in that committee.
In its latest report, the GHREN urged the international community to take Nicaragua to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) based in The Hague for violation of the Convention to Reduce Statelessness, which it ratified in 2013.
GHREN experts, mandated to contribute to access to justice and accountability, would provide key information that the group has not made public yet. However, the decision to prosecute Nicaragua internationally implies a commitment that not all countries want to assume at the political level. “It is an option, and it is important to take it into account,” says Marenco.
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The host countries
Spain was the first country to offer its nationality to more than 100 officially stateless Nicaraguan persons, whose denationalization was publicly announced by judicial authorities. Other governments such as those from Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, offered nationality rights later on as well.
Marenco explains that the people who are unrecognized as stateless are much more vulnerable because they don’t have any basis to start administrative processes in their host country, making it difficult for them to opt for international protection.
People are known to have found out about their unofficial statelessness while in the United States, Spain, Mexico, and throughout Central America.
The GHREN expert group called on countries currently hosting stateless persons to ensure “fair refugee status determinations and asylum processes,” to facilitate administrative regularization for those “who are arbitrarily denied passports and other identity documents,” and to monitor “the situation of persons subjected to transnational repression.”
