Why Dictators Fear Universal Jurisdiction

It may be the best weapon we have for holding autocrats accountable for their crimes, and the world’s democracies are beginning to rally behind it. 

By Ezequiel Podjarny

April 2025

The international community can do much better by those who suffer under regimes that perpetrate blatant human-rights violations. To see how, let us consider two cases from Latin America: Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Under President Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua has declared hundreds of dissidents to be noncitizens and forced them into exile. As he pushes toward a form of full-fledged dynastic totalitarianism, no opposition is permitted. Regime critics face severe harassment and persecution, while dissident journalists have been arbitrarily detained and even disappeared.

In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro committed blatant fraud in the 28 July 2024 election, claiming that he had won another six-year term and suppressing discontent with a brutal campaign of arrests, dozens of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture. These violations add to the already extensive list of offenses committed in Venezuela, contributing to a long descent into authoritarian rule that began under Maduro’s predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez.

These are just the latest crimes committed by these regimes. The UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela (FFM) and the Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (GHRE) have concluded that crimes against humanity in these two countries qualify as international crimes and are among “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.”

Yet the dictators may not have had the last word: A renewed push for accountability is brewing. In Argentina, prosecutors and civil society organizations gathered enough evidence against Ortega and Maduro to persuade Argentine courts to issue arrest warrants against them (the Maduro warrant was handed down in September 2024, and the Ortega warrant came in December). Dozens of their associates also face warrants.

This issuance of such warrants was made possible by the principle of universal jurisdiction, under which countries can prosecute people suspected of committing international crimes without being bound by the traditional rules of jurisdiction (under those rules either the perpetrator or the victim of the crime must be a citizen of the country that wishes to investigate, or the country bringing charges must allege that the actions under investigation were carried out on its territory).

Since international efforts have done nothing to dislodge either dictator and the courts in both Nicaragua and Venezuela are under full regime control, universal jurisdiction offers the best and perhaps the last chance to impose legal accountability on these rights abusers. As its name implies, universal jurisdiction is meant to transcend borders, and has its roots in the recognition of a collective responsibility to punish these grave crimes.

Universal jurisdiction faces significant resistance, however. At the forefront of the opposition stand dictators themselves. Their pushback means that now, more than ever, democracies need to rally behind this principle and secure its application to appropriate cases.

A New Avenue to Justice

While it may be contested, universal jurisdiction is certainly not untested. Landmark rulings have proven its ability to further the push for accountability on the ground. The most notable example is the 1998 arrest in London of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on a warrant issued by a judge in Spain. Even though Pinochet died of natural causes before he could be convicted, his arrest set a significant precedent and showed that autocrats can be held responsible for their actions.

More recently, trials premised on universal jurisdiction have played a role in the prosecution of crimes committed in Syria since 2011. These trials provide an important legal forum in which perpetrators can be held accountable. Several European countries have tried Syrian war criminals and officials involved in President Bashar al-Assad’s mass violations during the civil war, pushing this initiative forward and bringing at least a measure of justice and truth-finding to the thousands of civilian victims.

Assad himself fled to Russia when his rule collapsed in late 2024, receiving asylum from his fellow criminal dictator Vladimir Putin. Several officials of the Assad regime, however, have had to face foreign courts in which the interests of innocent Syrians and humanity as a whole have been represented. While skeptics note that these trials have so far failed to include any senior officials as defendants, a growing number of middle- and low-level officers have received convictions and sentences. If the fall of Assad and other brutal dictators has taught us anything, it is that the cracks in their power structures usually start from the bottom. Making ground-level regime agents worry that they may someday have to answer in court could serve to weaken these autocracies.

Bringing Universal Jurisdiction to Latin America

Venezuela and Nicaragua need not be exceptions to this rule. In fact, they make excellent examples of universal jurisdiction’s potential in a world where impunity for international crimes has become commonplace.

Nicaragua and Syria face a similar challenge: As neither country is a party to the 2002 Rome Statute, both remain outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The only way the ICC could intervene in either would be in response to a UN Security Council resolution. That will never happen, however, because Russia and China are permanent members and would veto any such move.

As for Venezuela, the ICC has an investigation open and the country appears to be cooperating with the prosecutor, especially since Venezuela filed its own self-referral denouncing the impact of economic sanctions. Does this obviate the need for an additional process under universal jurisdiction? It does not: It is unclear precisely which offenses the ICC is investigating, new violations are being committed, and those who have been arbitrarily detained or worse, disappeared, need help urgently. The ICC and universal jurisdiction do not have to be mutually exclusive, and when the situation demands it, they could complement each other.

Argentina became the place for Venezuelan and Nicaraguan victims and their supporters to pursue trials under universal jurisdiction. The country has a positive track record on the subject, aided by its own experience prosecuting crimes against humanity committed during the military dictatorship that ruled from 1976 to 1983, and meets all the technical and legal requirements to make investigations under universal jurisdiction viable.

The investigation of crimes against humanity committed in Nicaragua was opened in October 2022. President Ortega is a defendant, as is his wife and “co-president,” Rosario Murillo. The Ortega regime has turned the Nicaraguan judicial system into a tool of repression, with laws and security forces wielded as weapons against oppositionists, dissidents, and critics. With an ICC process ruled out, universal jurisdiction is the only recourse the regime’s victims have.

This leaves Venezuela. The first Argentine judge who considered universal-jurisdiction warrants against President Maduro and his aides turned down the request, citing the ongoing ICC investigation. An appeals court overturned that ruling in April 2024, however, and the investigation is moving forward. Something similar happened in 2021 when an investigation of the genocide against the Rohingya people in Burma was opened.

This detail is worth noting given claims that a dispute between Maduro and Argentine president Javier Milei is the “real” reason for the recent appeals-court opinion. The Burma ruling shows that Argentine juridical precedent in fact points toward issuing rather than denying warrants in the Venezuelan case. The September 2024 arrest warrants named not only Maduro but his interior and justice minister Diosdado Cabello and several other officials, accusing them of perpetrating crimes against humanity and calling for their referral to the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol).

If any Argentine trials end in convictions, they will be in absentia and very difficult to enforce. Among the hurdles will be the constraints of Interpol’s 1956 charter. Interpol itself has no powers of arrest, but (leaving aside the scenario in which a target of a warrant visits the jurisdiction of a state that will enforce it) it is the only entity that could aid in actually implementing the warrants. It could do so by issuing so-called red notices, the Interpol alerts (asking all member states to locate and arrest the persons named in them) that are currently the world’s nearest approximation to an international arrest warrant.

Red notices are controversial, and to issue them in the Nicaraguan or Venezuelan cases Interpol would have to accept exceptions to the diplomatic immunity of the prosecuted heads of state (something that other international legal bodies have accepted). Moreover, Interpol would have to conclude that acting in this way against Maduro and Ortega would be in keeping with its mandate to remain politically neutral.

Persuading Interpol to do either of these things will be challenging and points to the limits of universal jurisdiction as presently understood and practiced. Universal jurisdiction is such a valuable tool against impunity for international crimes that those who want to see such crimes punished by law must confront these limits and seek their expansion. The reality in Venezuela and Nicaragua, as in many other places, proves that the tools now available are insufficient. It is time to make those tools stronger.

Universal jurisdiction, like other tools in the international criminal framework, can contribute to the international push for a global accountability principle. As a developing legal recourse, universal jurisdiction needs a coalition to promote it. That coalition can ground itself on the facts now being established in Argentine courtrooms, as victims of the Nicaraguan and Venezuelan dictatorships bear witness and as facts about those regimes’ crimes and abuses are established under conditions in keeping with due process of law.

Ezequiel Podjarny is a legal and policy fellow at the Human Rights Foundation.

Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

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