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.