Venezuela begins definitive exit from the International Criminal Court

"On instructions from interim president Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela communicated to the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, its firm and irrevocable decision to denounce the Rome Statute and begin its definitive withdrawal from the ICC, in accordance with Article 127", Venezuelan Foreign Minister Félix Plasencia wrote in his account on X.

In March 2024, with Maduro still in power, the court rejected Venezuela's request for the court to stop investigating human rights abuses by members of the regime.

In July of the previous year, Caracas had appealed a decision to resume the investigation, arguing that, in this case, the principle of complementarity should be activated, according to which the court based in The Hague can only intervene if a country is not domestically investigating these alleged crimes.

But the appeals judges unanimously rejected all the grounds of the regime's appeal and gave the green light for the ICC to resume its investigation into the abuses, which could be classified as crimes against humanity.

In 2020, the ICC prosecutor said there was a reasonable basis to believe that regime officials and military personnel had committed crimes against humanity in Venezuela since 2017, a year of intense street protests in the country and, as a result, intense repression.

Protesters in 2017 led months of demonstrations against the regime, in a period marked by accusations of torture, arbitrary arrests and abuses by security forces. The protests left at least 125 people dead.

The process was actually opened in 2021, after leaders of six countries requested that the regime be investigated for crimes committed since 2014.

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