Venezuelan lawmakers declare UN human rights chief persona non grata

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CARACAS — Venezuela’s ruling party-controlled National Assembly on Tuesday declared Volker Turk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, persona non grata, criticizing the UN official for failing to protect the rights of Venezuelan migrants deported by the Trump administration to a prison in El Salvador.

The rare diplomatic designation has no immediate practical effect but reflected the broader anger of President Nicolas Maduro at the UN agency that monitors and defends human rights. It comes just days after Turk said his office has documented increasing arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances and torture under Maduro’s government.

“Turk turns a blind eye to atrocious crimes,” said National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez, who is also Maduro’s chief negotiator with the U.S. “He does nothing for the human rights of Venezuelans in the United States and El Salvador.”

El Salvador is holding 252 Venezuelans deported from the U.S. in a maximum-security prison. Turk recently urged the U.S. to halt deportations of Venezuelans who may be at risk of arrest in their home country and raised concerns about the lack of due process in mass deportations from the U.S.

The ire of Venezuela’s National Assembly appeared to have been energized by Turk’s speech to the Human Rights Council in Geneva last Friday.

Turk raised alarm over an intensifying crackdown on civil liberties in the wake of Venezuela’s parliamentary elections in June and the unrest that followed Maduro’s disputed re-election last year — echoing past statements of concern from his agency and other watchdogs.

Electoral authorities loyal to the ruling party declared Maduro the winner of the July 2024 presidential election despite credible evidence to the contrary.

“I am very concerned by detention conditions, including people being denied access to medical care, and lacking access to food and water,” he told the council last week. “Some prisoners were subjected to incommunicado detention.”

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Lawmakers called on Maduro to withdraw Venezuela’s membership from the Human Rights Council while Turk remains in his post.

Turk’s office offered no immediate response to the National Assembly decision.

The move Tuesday raised new questions over the status of the UN human rights office in Venezuela’s capital of Caracas, which partly resumed operations last December — months after Maduro’s government forced it to close and expelled its staff, accusing the agency’s employees of aiding “coup-plotters and terrorists” as tensions surged in the run-up to the presidential election.