Peace Brigades International co-organizes side event in Geneva on the day Nicaragua withdraws from the UN Human Rights Council

Published by Brent Patterson on March 7, 2025March 7, 2025

Photo: PBI co-organized side event in Geneva, February 27.

On February 26, the U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (OHCHR) issued a press release that stated: “Nicaragua’s Government has dismantled the last remaining checks on its power, systematically executing a strategy to cement total control of the country through severe human rights violations, UN experts warned today in a new report. The experts called for decisive international action to address these violations.”

The following day, February 27, Peace Brigades International co-organized a U.N. Side Event at the 58th Session of the Human Rights Council on constitutional reform in Nicaragua. You can read more about that at in this PBI-Switzerland article: Nicaragua Side Event: A Systematic Erosion of Rights.

That same day, Reuters also reported: “Nicaragua announced on Thursday [February 27] it would withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council, following a UN report that urged the international community to address human rights violations by President Daniel Ortega’s government.”

Then on this Friday March 7, Democracy Now! noted: “Nicaragua announced last week it is withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Council, following a U.N. report that slammed the government’s human rights violations and warned the country was becoming an authoritarian state.”

To watch their interview with Reed Brody, a member of the U.N. expert panel, click here. Democracy Now! also explains: “[This comes] 40 years to the day since the release of his landmark 1985 fact-finding report Contra Terror in Nicaragua, which laid out how U.S. policy attempted to destabilize Nicaragua’s Sandinista government by funding the Contras and their campaign of torture, rape, kidnapping and murder.”

Video still: Reed Brody talks about the current situation in Nicaragua.

In September 1983, 10 Peace Brigades International volunteers maintained a short presence in Jalapa, close to the Honduran border, interposing themselves between US-backed contras and the Sandinista forces to deter hostilities. This initial PBI work was taken over and continued by Witness for Peace. JoLeigh Commandant, who became the first director of PBI’s Toronto-based Central America Project around November 1982, was part of our presence there.

To read more about that time, please see: PBI in Jalapa, Nicaragua in 1983 as “tracer bullets lit up the sky”.

Following the political crisis in Nicaragua in 2018, PBI began an accompaniment project for Nicaraguan organizations and social groups exiled in Costa Rica. The project provides capacity development for exiled human rights defenders, from psychosocial support to organizational strengthening and security and protection strategies, focusing on improving their conditions for an eventual return to Nicaragua.

For more on the current work of PBI-Nicaragua, please click here.