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The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH), announced that 4 priests and lay people were sentenced to over 10 years in prison by the government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The court sentence was given on February 6th, 2023 by Judge Nadia Tardencilla of the Second Criminal Trial District. The priests are Fr. Ramiro Reynaldo Tijerino Chávez, age 50, rector of the John Paul II University; Sadiel Antonio Eugarrios Cano, age 35, former vicar of the Matagalpa cathedral; and José Luis Díaz Cruz, age 33, vicar of the Matagalpa cathedral. A deacon named Raúl Antonio Vega González, age 27; the 2 seminarians: Darvin Esteylin Leiva Mendoza, age 19, and Melkin Antonio Centeno Sequeira, age 23; and the photographer Sergio José Cárdenas Flores, age 32.
CENIDH Release:
Ortega Murillo regime finds guilty priests who accompanied Monsignor in the episcopal curia of Matagalpa
After 4 days of judicial torture, the Ortega Murillo regime handed down a guilty verdict for the crimes of impairment and propagation of false news against priests, seminarians and lay people who accompanied Monsignor Rolando Álvarez in the episcopal curia of Matagalpa.
There is no doubt that this request for a 10-year and 800-day fine issued by the Prosecutor's Office for all was issued from El Carmen, with the desire to sow terror and demonstrate who has power. From CENIDH WE CONDEMN this violation of #HR and the guarantees of due process
This fact poses a challenge to the leaders of the Catholic Church,
We ask you to react, you cannot keep silent, the regime has practically imprisoned an entire Diocese. We invite you to stand next to the believing people who are outraged. #NoMoreIndifference
We demand the Ortega Murillo regime to release Monsignor Rolando Álvarez and all the priests accused of conscience in Nicaragua
There is no doubt that this request for a 10-year and 800-day fine issued by the Prosecutor's Office for all was issued from El Carmen, with the desire to sow terror and demonstrate who has power. From CENIDH WE CONDEMN this violation of #HR and the guarantees of due process
This fact poses a challenge to the leaders of the Catholic Church,
We ask you to react, you cannot keep silent, the regime has practically imprisoned an entire Diocese. We invite you to stand next to the believing people who are outraged. #NoMoreIndifference
We demand the Ortega Murillo regime to release Monsignor Rolando Álvarez and all the priests accused of conscience in Nicaragua
#SonInocentes.
CENIDH Release:
The indiscriminate repression of the Ortega Murillo regime against Nicaraguans continues unstoppable. We place special emphasis on the last conviction handed down by Judge Nadia Tardencilla against the priests Ramiro Tijerino, Sadiel Eugarrios, José Luis Diaz, Raúl Vegas, the seminarians Darvin Leiva and Melkin Centeno and the cameraman Sergio Cárdenas, whom the police kept kidnapped together with Monsignor Rolando Álvarez in the episcopal curia of Matagalpa, from August 4 to 19, 2022.
These seven members of the Diocese of Matagalpa have remained since that August 19 —when they were transferred to Managua— locked up in the ergastulas of the Directorate of Judicial Assistance, better known as the new Chipote, suffering the same subhuman conditions that all the diocese suffer. political prisoners who are in that place, under permanent torture, torture that has already been widely documented and reported, but we will not tire of repeating and pointing out who is directly and indirectly responsible for so much pain: the Ortega Murillo regime and its operators concerned.
With this last sentence it was exposed that the regime is committing crimes with impunity and the so-called Judicial Power, by being in contravention of what the laws say and acting against the express law, incur in the commission of crimes typified in the Penal Code of the Republic of Nicaragua, for those who are to be judged.
Articles 46, 47 and 66, among others, of the current Penal Code establish what the penalties are, their nature, how they are applied, and classify them as principal and accessory penalties. In this case it happens that the judge imposes the prison sentences that supposedly deserve the crimes attributed to the priests; five years in prison for conspiracy to undermine national integrity and five years for alleged propagation of false news, plus an 800-day fine.
But the biggest aberration, the latest violation of the intelligence of Nicaraguans and the international community is the absolute disqualification FOR LIFE from holding any public office or popular election and the exercise of political rights. According to the aforementioned article, these are accessory penalties that cannot last longer than the time established in the main penalty, therefore, these disqualifications would have to last for the ten years that Judge Tardencilla, famous for her aberrations and her criminal docility, has applied to them.
For CENIDH, this is an affront to the law, an affront to intelligence, an affront to the international community and international organizations for the protection of human rights, which are constantly insisting on condemning violations of the guarantees of due process, to which they are subjected to political prisoners in Nicaragua.
We denounce before the world not only this aberration committed against the seven members of the Diocese of Matagalpa, this new repressive action has begun to be applied by several judges, at the request of prosecutors in previous cases, adding final sentences in the following ways:
"Add sentence number XX...", "Keep the convicted person... as a traitor to the country, consequently he is permanently disqualified for..."; expressly violating the arts. 55 and 56 of the Penal Code that they invoke, since said articles indicate the duration of these "deprivation of other rights", so they can never be applied indefinitely.
We have a list of more than 14 political prisoners to whom the same application has been made, with the aggravating circumstance that the judges, at the request of the prosecutors, without any formality, without having any power to change a letter of a sentence that is firm, alter its content and it is the last straw that they are not only doing so with those sentences that have not yet been sent to the higher instance due to the appeals filed, they are even criminally modifying others that are or have been ruled by the Court Supreme Court (CSJ).
We denounce before the world this legal barbarity, this indiscriminate persecution that is the total destruction not only of the institutional framework but of any vestige of legal security that remains in the country, it is the annihilation of the political prisoners for whom we demand their immediate release.
Press Releases https://www.cenidh.org/noticias/1259/
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