The United Nations Human Rights Council approved on Friday the renewal of the mandate of the so-called Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Venezuela, whose government considers that instance as a mechanism of aggression and interference.
The renewal of the mandate of the mission, created in 2019 to evaluate alleged human rights violations committed in Venezuela since 2014, was approved by 19 votes, five against and 23 abstentions during a Council session in Geneva. The work of the mission on Venezuela, known as MIIV, will be for another two years.
Against were Cuba, Bolivia, China, Eritrea and Venezuela itself, whose representative before the Council, Ambassador Héctor Constante Rosales, said shortly before the vote that the resolution was “hostile.”
In Caracas, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Carlos Faría wrote on his Twitter account (NYSE: TWTR ) that the extension of the MIIV’s mandate was “a new outrage against Venezuela.”
The mission “is designed for interventionism and for the falsification of reality. This commission is a political instrument for the most brazen defamation on human rights issues,” added the minister.
In September, the MIIV presented its third report on the South American country indicating that the intelligence agencies of the State of Venezuela, under a plan orchestrated by President Nicolás Maduro, repress the opposition through arbitrary arrests and torture that constitute crimes against humanity.
The report details that the functions and contributions of several people in the chain of command of organizations such as the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) and the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN), depend on President Maduro.
Both the SEBIN and the DGCIM “used sexual and gender-based violence to torture and humiliate their detainees” since at least 2014 and “the violations and crimes of the SEBIN and the DGCIM continue to this day,” the mission added.
The Maduro government repudiated the report as “false and baseless.”
“Through a pseudo report, without the slightest methodological support or direct contact with reality in the country, the intention is to continue attacking Venezuelan institutions,” the government said in a statement in September, shortly after the report was released.
Non-governmental groups welcomed the extension of the MIIV’s mandate. Amnesty International welcomes the extension “as a sign of support and backing for the countless victims of serious human rights violations that have been committed, and continue to be committed, in the country,” said Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International. in a statement posted on his Twitter account.
