Caracas Chronicles

This week ended with some news for the Maduro regime and the people who accuse it of violating human rights. The Appeal Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) broadcasted live its sentence on the appeal introduced by the Venezuelan state against resuming the Venezuela I cause at the ICC. The decision: the investigation must continue.

All six reasons argued by the State, such as the problem with translations and the temporal reach of the investigation, were studied by the ICC Appeal Chamber and dismissed one by one – at their entirety and unanimously. So the decision impugned by Room 1 for Preliminary Questions, in June 2023, stays. This means that the ICC Prosecutor is authorized to resume the investigation on crimes against humanity committed in Venezuela. 

Without saying it explicitly, this new decision also ratifies that the regime has no will to investigate what it should according to the principle of complementarity. In other words, the ICC knows that the Maduro government is not investigating and punishing the high officers responsible. It isn’t delivering tangible, concrete results. 

For the regime, this sentence is biased, and “responds to an intention of instrumentalizing the tools of international criminal justices for political purposes”. The official narrative insists again on denying the crimes against humanity that, as we speak, are still being committed.

This time, however, the communique released by foreign minister Yván Gil was a bit less hostile, compared to the one that announced the expulsion of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights’ of the technical assistance office personnel. This is because the regime knows what’s coming: today’s was a definitive sentence, the investigation cannot be delayed or stopped, and there will be no more procedural obstacles available in the way of the investigation. Now, the ICC prosecutors will open specific cases to determine the facts that will individualize the culprits, and provide the basis to issuing detention orders.

How much longer will we have to wait to see those accusations? Months or years. The important thing is that the process goes on, these crimes cannot expire, and the ICC is going to install a technical cooperation office in Caracas. From now on, the Maduro regime –paying a considerable cost in terms of international relations– will have to boycott the work of the investigators on the field in order to stop this, which implies paying.