And it's not clear yet what's going to happen to dissident Nicaraguans who remain in the country. PERALTA: I'm hearing a lot of defiance, but also uncertainty. At the time, the majority on the Supreme Court wrote that denationalization was, quote, "a form of punishment more primitive than torture."įADEL: So what are some of the banished saying? PERALTA: And being stateless - let's be clear - means that you lose your right to have rights. And that's because the Supreme Court recognized the terrible consequences of being stateless. But it's cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to have denied him any nationality whatsoever. GABRIEL CHIN: The Army could have sentenced him to death. But the Supreme Court actually ruled that this was cruel and unusual punishment. soldier was stripped of his nationality for deserting the military in the battlefield.
He says what the Ortega regime has done is a, quote, "clear violation of international human rights law." And he pointed to a case in the United States that shows how serious the situation is. So the right to nationality was accepted as a universal human right. And what the world realized is that leaving someone stateless was terrible.
PERALTA: You know, I spoke to Gabriel Chin, and he studies nationality at UC Davis, and he says that this became a thing after the First World War. They said the government was taking over their possessions and that these people would no longer have any rights in Nicaragua for the rest of their lives.įADEL: How common is it to denationalize citizens? A judge said that they had been stripped of their nationality. On Wednesday, a judge said that 94 Nicaraguans - and these include human rights activists, writers, journalists - had been sentenced to what amounts to a civic death. Without a public trial, the government has branded many dissidents as traitors. And these past two weeks, they've been flexing that muscle. He and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, now control all three branches of government. Ortega used violence to quash that pro-democracy movement. And that's when things changed dramatically in Nicaragua. And in 2018, there was this huge popular rebellion against him. He helped topple a dictatorship in the '70s. So President Daniel Ortega is a former guerrilla fighter. If you could just give us a sense of what's led to this point. Good morning, Eyder.ĮYDER PERALTA, BYLINE: Good morning, Leila.įADEL: So before we get into the stripping of citizenships, let's go back. This week, it is continuing those attacks, stripping nearly 100 more dissidents of their citizenship.įADEL: NPR's Eyder Peralta is following this story from his base in Mexico City. The country took away their citizenship, put them on a plane and sent them to Washington, D.C. Last week, Nicaragua banished 222 political prisoners. In Nicaragua, the government of President Daniel Ortega is ramping up its attacks on political dissidents.
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