Criminalization of peaceful protest, arbitrary arrests, summary trials, sentences of up to 30 years in prison, imprisoned opponents with deteriorating health: the human rights situation in Cuba is “dramatic”, the rapporteur of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights affirmed on Thursday (IACHR) for the island.
The jurist Stuardo Ralón, one of the seven members of the IACHR, spoke after this OAS body expressed its “concern” about the hundreds of people detained and prosecuted for participating in the demonstrations last July in Cuba, and that urged his release.
Q: What is the human rights situation in Cuba?
A: It is dramatic because people’s freedom is not respected. There is a single party, the Communist Party, to which you have to belong in order to participate in politics. And anyone who demonstrates against the regime, issues a different idea or demands freedom, is subject to arbitrary arrests, trials and prison sentences of up to 30 years.
Q: The San Isidro Movement, created in 2018 by artists and intellectuals to demand greater freedom of expression, said on Wednesday that one of its founders, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, arrested on July 11, was on a hunger strike and his health was poor. precarious What does the IACHR know about him?
A: The last we know is of detention conditions in which his health is very delicate and about which we are extremely concerned. The information we have is that the situation in prisons is overcrowded, without the basic conditions of respect for people’s dignity, and that when detainees are on hunger strike their health is extremely affected. We have information that there are other people in conditions similar to those of Otero Alcántara.
Q: How many are still detained for the July protests?
A: According to the information we have, there are 790 detainees subject to trials, many of them summary, without real guarantees of the right to defense, with prison sentences of up to 30 years. And these sentences in summary trials are intended as a message of censorship, of punishment for thinking and expressing themselves differently from the current regime on the island.
Q: The IACHR noted in a statement the detention of dozens of adolescents, saying that it is a measure that should be used as a last resort.
A: This is another principle that has been broken.
Q: Many protesters were charged with sedition. What does the IACHR think?
A: We have realized that in many of these processes without guarantees, ambiguous typifications are used, such as crimes of sedition or terrorism. The intention is really to criminalize an act that was asking for a democratic opening.
Q: Cuba was excluded from the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1962, after the Castro revolution, and since 2009, when that decision was annulled, it has not asked for its reincorporation. Does the IACHR have jurisdiction to rule on Cuba?
A: Yes. The Commission’s competence to monitor respect for human rights throughout the continent includes Cuba.
Q: The activist Anamely Ramos denounced that she was prevented from returning to Havana “for political reasons.” Can a government deny entry to the country to one of its citizens?
A: An international standard is that a national cannot be prohibited from entering their own country. The problem is that when there is no democracy, but a single power that violates human rights, individual guarantees, this type of abuse can occur. This is clearly something extremely serious and also a clear violation of human rights.
Q: What should the international community do?
A: I believe that there is an enormous responsibility of the different international organizations, of different States, of each one according to their competences, to make visible and denounce, as the IACHR does when there are violations, and demand that these situations not be experienced. If these voices go in unison, making the situation visible, an expected possibility of change can be generated.
Q: Cuba affirms that it has sovereignty to resolve its own affairs.
A: Each State has sovereignty to establish certain norms and institutions, and mechanisms or policies for its own social reality. That is recognized by the OAS itself. However, this concept cannot be applied so that a power of a determined State violates human rights.
Q: The Cuban government accuses the dissidents of being financed by the United States, which seeks regime change in Cuba, and the OAS of being an instrument of Washington. What do you think as commissioner?
A: We do not make political assessments. As a technical body for monitoring human rights, it seems to us that there are legitimate claims. We condemn that there are systematic human rights violations in Cuba. (OR)
Source: Eluniverso
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