On February 25, Alfredo Ruiz Angulo submitted his resignation as Ombudsman in a letter in which he cited “personal, family and health reasons”. That same day, Tarek Saab resigned as General Prosecutor, stating in his resignation letter that he had “honorably and with integrity” fulfilled the position to which he had been appointed. Both resignations occurred prematurely, before the end of their terms, which were set to run until 2031. These events unfolded within the context of a power struggle within the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), which controls all branches of government. The PSUV has been forced to reshuffle some officials following the armed incursion on January 3 by the United States government and the arrest of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores. The simultaneous and premature resignations of both officials demonstrate their lack of independence and their subordination to the political group in power.
On February 25, the same day as the resignations, the National Assembly (AN) appointed the Nominations Evaluation Committee for the selection of candidates for the positions of Ombudsman and General Prosecutor. The committee will be composed of 13 deputies who, according to the AN press release, “must present to the Plenary, within a period of 30 days or less, the candidates eligible for the positions of General Prosecutor and Ombudsman.”
The composition of this committee contradicts Article 279 of the Constitution, which states that “The Republican Moral Council shall convene a Citizen Power Nominations Evaluation Committee, composed of representatives from various sectors of society; it shall conduct a public process from which a shortlist of three candidates will be drawn up for each Citizen Power body, which will be submitted to the National Assembly for consideration. The Assembly, by a two-thirds majority vote of its members, shall select, within a period of no more than thirty consecutive days, the head of the Citizen Power body under consideration.”
With the complete exclusion of civil society from the committee established by the Constitution, the National Assembly assumed the role of nomination evaluator, announcing on March 2nd the process for receiving credentials before the Assembly itself, invoking Article 280 of the Constitution for the Ombudsman’s Office and Articles 263 and 284 for the General Prosecutor. These articles define the profile of each of the positions, but they are not the articles that establish the appointment procedure, so the AN deliberately omitted the legal basis of the nomination process, assigning itself a function that does not correspond to it.
The Power Play
The day after the resignations, on February 26, Tarek Saab was sworn in before the National Assembly as Acting Ombudsman. Article 26 of the Organic Law of the Ombudsman’s Office (LODP) establishes that the executive director must fill the position of Ombudsman until a new one is appointed. Saab’s appointment is just one more in a long line of irregularities that demonstrate the lack of independence of the Ombudsman’s Office. As if all of the above were not enough, on March 4, Saab commemorated the 26th anniversary of the Ombudsman’s Office, “with the participation of directors,” according to the institutional press release. Among the directors was Alfredo Ruiz, the same one who just resigned “for personal and health reasons.”
Saab’s position at the Prosecutor’s Office was filled by Larry Devoe, who, among the eight positions he held simultaneously, was that of State Agent before the International Human Rights System, representing Venezuela before the IACHR and UN bodies. As in the case of the Ombudsman’s Office, the permanent absence of the Prosecutor must be filled in by the Deputy Prosecutor, according to Article 24 of the Organic Law of the Public Ministry, meaning that none of the interim appointees follow the succession mechanism established by the Constitution and the laws.
Profile of the Interim Officials
The interim Ombudsman comes from serving as General Prosecutor during a highly criticized tenure. The December 2021 report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela on the independence of the judiciary in the country documented various irregularities in the Prosecutor’s performance, including the elimination of the prosecutorial career track, the abuse of disciplinary sanctions against prosecutors who made autonomous decisions, and the suspension of reports to the National Assembly. AlertaVenezuela documented the main actions and statements of General Prosecutor Tarek William Saab from July 29 to August 17, 2024, following the electoral fraud. The main findings of this monitoring include, among others, violations of the principle of presumption of innocence; the use of derogatory terms against detainees, such as criminals, delinquents, misfits, terrorists, and drug addicts; the dismissal of peaceful protest as a destabilizing element; calls to apply the maximum sentence (30 years in prison) to detainees, without the possibility of pardon or other benefits; the detention of officials who failed to comply with orders to prosecute; and defiant language toward international human rights organizations, regarding their alleged defense of “terrorists.”
Furthermore, it should be recalled that Saab had served as Ombudsman from 2014 to 2017, when the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions decided to downgrade the Ombudsman’s Office from Category A to Category B for failing to comply with the Paris Principles on the institution’s independence.
For his part, Larry Devoe has held eight positions simultaneously, all directly linked to the executive branch, which disqualifies him as an independent individual to carry out the functions of the Public Prosecutor’s Office. As a state agent, he was characterized by his systematic denial of human rights violations in the country. There are reports of human rights defenders being threatened by this official. Among his responsibilities was the preparation of the first National Human Rights Plan (PNDH), for which civil society was invited to participate in symbolic consultations that were ultimately ignored. When the second PNDH was being drafted, independent civil society organizations demanded a prior evaluation of the first plan, which was never carried out. The second National Human Rights Plan has not yet been prepared.
Both Saab and Devoe are subject to sanctions imposed by the Canadian government and the European Union for being responsible for or complicit in serious human rights violations and for undermining democracy.
Political maneuvering and a war of numbers in the National Assembly
During consultations on the amnesty bill, civil society organizations proposed the creation of an independent commission to monitor the law’s implementation. The National Assembly accepted the commission proposal, but with a composition drawn from within the Assembly itself, consisting of twenty-two deputies headed by Jorge Arreaza, Hugo Chávez’s son-in-law. According to the National Assembly’s press release, the commission members include Nicolás Maduro Guerra, son of Nicolás Maduro, and Cilia Flores, Maduro’s wife, who is imprisoned in the United States.
Since the commission’s creation, Arreaza has provided a series of unverifiable figures regarding the number of applications from people hoping to benefit from the amnesty law and the number of people who have supposedly benefited. The commission’s lack of independence makes it impossible to have a reliable inventory of what is happening with the law’s application.
It is worth recalling that, following the announcements of prisoner releases made in early February, spokespeople for the de facto ruling party provided unverifiable figures on the number of releases. The self-appointed interim president requested that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) travel to Venezuela to verify the releases. Temporary visas were granted to several OHCHR officials who remained in Venezuela for approximately two weeks. To date, information gaps regarding the releases persist, while uncertainty grows and the expectations of the families of political prisoners are mocked.
The international community must acknowledge that the oversight mechanism imposed by the U:S. has not only failed to dismantle the repressive apparatus but also continues to keep the same figures who have played an active role in political persecution and who have been subject to international measures of condemnation for their human rights violations in power. In these circumstances it is fictitious to speak of a transition to democracy, since the problem is not the time elapsed since the imposition of Rodríguez as president, but the absence of genuine gestures in that direction.