MIAMI – The Venezuelan National Assembly approved on Thursday a long-awaited general amnesty bill, introduced by interim president Delcy Rodríguez in late January with the aim of achieving what she terms “national reconciliation.”
However, critics of the acting government in Caracas, including human rights organizations, fear the law does not include those currently under detention, for whom relatives have camped outside of detention facilities and are now on their fifth day of a hunger strike demanding their release.
Interim President Rodríguez expressed that she was “very pleased” with the assembly’s passing of the bill. Rodríguez, alongside Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, celebrated the measure during a ceremony held on the foot steps of Miraflores Palace in Caracas.
“We must know how to ask for forgiveness and we must also know how to receive forgiveness. This law opens an extraordinary door for Venezuela to come together again,” Rodríguez stated.
Jorge Rodríguez added that by the passing of the general amnesty, the assembly’s president hopes that the law can lay the foundations for a Venezuelan future shrouded in optimism and embark on a new course of national peace.
Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo González, however, wrote on X on Thursday morning that an amnesty bill “must be built on clear rules, justice, and solid institutional guarantees.”
Among the conditions González says should be included in the bill are that “no one is ever again persecuted for political reasons... reparations for the victims... [and] firm guarantees of non-repetition.”
Foro Penal, a Venezuelan-based human rights organization that provides legal counsel to political prisoners in the South American country, asserts 644 political prisoners remain detained in Venezuela to this day.
