NEW YORK CITY — Eight years after Nicaragua’s 2018 political crisis began, the United Nations’ Human Rights Office told the U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday that the country’s human rights situation is “increasingly worrying” — and that repression has “reached every sector’ of Nicaraguan society, in one of several pointed U.N. assessments of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s government delivered this month.

The U.N. Human Rights Office presented its report to the Human Rights Council covering the period between June 2025 and June 2026, concluding that “political pluralism no longer exists in either national institutions or at the local level.”

Maarit Kohonen, the office’s director of Global Operations, cited a specific and striking piece of evidence while presenting the report: of 185 votes recorded in Nicaragua’s National Assembly during the period studied, not one registered a single dissenting vote — not even among the 15 legislators from parties formally outside the governing coalition. “The same reality is reproduced locally, where the governing party controls all 153 of the country’s municipalities.”

Kohonen tied the consolidation directly to institutional changes over the past year, including a legal reform that subordinated oversight bodies to the presidency, granting it the power to appoint the country’s Attorney General.

She said the most recent constitutional reform, proposed and approved on September 1 — the reform we covered in detail as it moved through Nicaragua’s Assembly, extending presidential terms and barring anyone labeled a “traitor to the homeland” from future elections deepens this trend, by incorporating broad prohibitions on political participation specifically designed to further exclude the opposition.

Detentions, Deaths & Forced Disappearances

A separate, related U.N. report released on September 16 documented that repression has shifted in character since 2018: rather than mass detentions during street protests, the government has moved toward more selective measures targeting political dissent specifically. That report found that in at least 29 of 35 documented cases of arbitrary detention during the period studied, those affected were allegedly victims of forced disappearance, with at least eight such cases still open as of June 15, 2026.

The U.N. separately flagged as “especially alarming” a rise in deaths of detainees held in state custody, with at least four such cases reported between June 2025 and June 2026, including that of Miskito Indigenous leader Brooklyn Rivera.

Media Closures & Harassment

The same report documented the continued closure of independent media outlets during the period, with one additional outlet shut down, bringing the total number of closed media organizations to at least 56.

Civil society groups reported close to 100 separate incidents against journalists both inside and outside Nicaragua, including threats, defamation campaigns, surveillance, and police harassment.

A Third Report: Corrupt Financing & Transnational Espionage

In March, a separate group of U.N. human rights experts presented findings alleging that repression in Nicaragua is directly financed through institutional corruption, and documented a surveillance network operating against Nicaraguan exiles abroad.

Jan-Michael Simon, who chairs that Group of Human Rights Experts, said “repression and institutional corruption have become the method of governing in Nicaragua under the control of the Ortega-Murillo family. That group’s findings specifically named Nicaragua’s current Co-Minister of Foreign Relations, Valdrack Jaentschke — a figure we’ve covered directly responding to regional criticism of Nicaragua’s election reform — alleging that while holding senior diplomatic posts abroad between 2021 and 2023, he was part of a high-level group tasked with directing and coordinating transnational repression operations across multiple countries.

Notably, all of this month’s reporting was compiled remotely. Nicaragua’s government has refused to allow representatives of the U.N. Human Rights Office to enter the country to conduct their assessments directly, forcing investigators to rely on remote documentation methods.

Nicaragua’s own delegation was absent from Monday’s presentation to the Human Rights Council — the country withdrew from the Council entirely in 2025, alongside the United States and Israel.

The U.N.’s Direct Recommendations

The Human Rights Office closed its presentation by reiterating its call for Nicaragua “to release all arbitrarily detained individuals, end repressive practices, and resume cooperation with regional and UN human rights mechanisms.”

The March report from the separate Group of Experts went further, urging Ortega and Murillo directly to ensure accountability, restore civic space, and take meaningful measures guaranteeing the rights of all Nicaraguans, including those in exile.

Regional Reaction

The OAS Secretary-General has already voiced support for the U.N.’s findings, calling for hemispheric unity in response to the situation — an echo of the divided-but-vocal regional response we've documented previously, in which Peru, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Paraguay have issued formal rebukes of Nicaragua’s political trajectory, while Brazil and Mexico have remained comparatively quiet.

With the report now formally before the Human Rights Council’s 63rd session, running through October, and Nicaragua’s government continuing to reject direct U.N. access to the country, further pressure on Ortega and Murillo’s government is likely to remain diplomatic and reputational rather than enforceable in any binding sense — consistent with the pattern of documented findings, formal condemnation, and limited concrete consequence that has defined the international community’s response to Nicaragua throughout 2026.