NSCAG and Alliance for Global Justice report refutes biased Amnesty International reports

NSCAG News | on: Monday, 25 February 2019



In 2018 Amnesty International produced two reports on Nicaragua, accusing the Nicaraguan government of ‘a strategy of indiscriminate repression’. The context was violent protests which broke out in April last year and ended last July. The Nicaraguan government was accused by AI of using ‘arbitrary detention’ and ‘excessive, disproportionate and unnecessary force’ in dealing with the opposition’s violence.

Our new report, Dismissing the Truth, not only refutes the claims made by Amnesty International but shows that the evidence they produce is biased, incomplete and in several cases simply wrong. The report, prepared for the Alliance for Global Justice in the US and the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action Group in the UK, was researched and written by an independent group of people based both in Nicaragua and in the US/UK. It uses eye-witness accounts, reports from government and human rights bodies, media analysis and knowledge of the places where events highlighted by AI took place, to examine AI’s analysis and claims.

Dismissing the Truth includes a case study of one region of Nicaragua showing how AI might have carried out a balanced appraisal of the violence and who caused it. It shows that, over a similar period to that covered by AI reports, half the deaths reported as linked to the protests in this region had other causes, and of the protest-linked deaths, all but one resulted from opposition violence.

Dismissing the Truth concludes that AI completely fails to establish its case that there is ‘a strategy of indiscriminate repression’ on the part of the Nicaraguan government.

An Executive Summary of the report can be found here

The full report can be found here



