Nicaragua.- Nicaragua approves the Foreign Agents Law amid criticism of the...

MADRID, 16 (EUROPA PRESS)

The National Assembly of Nicaragua has approved this Thursday the Law of Regulation of Foreign Agents, which controls the activities of those people or companies that receive financing from abroad, a law that the opposition and Human Rights organizations have described as an instrument of political repression and restriction of freedoms.

With 70 votes in favor, the Assembly has approved this legal framework whose objective is to regulate “natural or legal persons who respond to foreign interests and financing and use it to carry out activities that result in interference by foreign organizations and governments in matters inmates of Nicaragua, putting the security of the State at risk, “according to the official ‘El 19’.

The Government of Daniel Ortega, who presented the proposal in September, argues that this legal framework guarantees the defense and protection of Nicaragua’s independence, sovereignty and self-determination.

Those classified as “foreign agents” by the Administration must register with the Ministry of the Interior and detail the funds received, as well as how they are spent. They will also be prohibited from intervening in domestic politics, under threat of criminal sanctions.

For the opposition Civic Alliance of Nicaragua, the law “criminalizes organizations, companies, media and associations that receive funds from external governments” and, in addition, “violates human and constitutional rights,” they have denounced through Twitter.

“The Ortega dictatorship, through the National Assembly, approved this known as ‘Putin law’, which is unconstitutional because it violates public freedoms with the aim of curtailing the operational capacity of political organizations that oppose the dictatorship,” he denounced the executive director of the coalition, Juan Sebastián Chamorro, through a video broadcast on social networks.

“With the application of the Law for the Regulation of Foreign Agents, the National Assembly seeks to silence again those who defend Human Rights in Nicaragua,” Amnesty International (AI) has lamented through Twitter.

This approval confirms that “the Ortega government is not willing to stop the repression”, so “the international community must be energetic and condemn this state conduct,” said the director for the Americas of AI, Erika Guevara.