Electoral participation: Venezuela & United States

(Part 2 of a 4-part series comparing voting in the United States and Venezuela, in light of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Part 1 is here; Part 3 is here; Part 4 is here.)

An unprecedented 80.48% of Venezuela’s over 18 million registered voters participated in the presidential elections that took place on October 7 – elections at which, as I posted yesterday, I served as an international observer.
Fifteen years ago in Venezuela, a country with a population of around 27.1 million, only about 13 million voters were registered and eligible to vote. (Photo Credit: Swiss Delegation, CNE Accompañamiento Internacional de las Elecciones del 7 de octubre, 2012, Estado de Monagas, Venezuela)
Dr. Tibisay Lucena, current President of Venezuela's Consejo Nacional Electoral, the election council known as CNE, has engaged in some analysis of the massive shift in levels of participation in her essay, The Venezuelan Experience. Lucena and other members of the CNE, including Vice President Sandra Oblitas, attribute much of the increased participation to the massive investment of the CNE in electoral inclusion in historically disenfranchised urban and rural communities.

Tibisay Lucena

Earlier in 2012, before the registration process closed in April, Tamara Pearson of Venezuelanalysis.com reported that

Sandra Oblitas Ruzza

'CNE set up 1,300 registration tents around the country and in overseas consulates, and 1,360,598 people registered to vote for the first time, while 4,512,000 changed their voting address, according to CNE director Sandra Oblitas.'

Pearson reported that 89% of the new registrations were among youth aged 18 to 25; other new registrations included individuals who had since been granted Venezuelan nationality, people who were unable to register due to rural isolation or perhaps a disability, and people who chose not to register prior to 2012. Only individuals with Venezuelan nationality could vote in the October presidential elections; residents can vote in the upcoming December 16 regional elections.
Oblitas has stated that the gap between those able to vote and those registered had been reduced to 3.5%, a statistic she interpreted as a great advance and a direct result of a broader policy of participatory inclusion. The CNE employs over 400,000 people to staff the electoral mesas, provide on the ground digital technology support, and directly administer the electoral process, and maintains an independent budget of over Bs 2,273,000,000 (US$ 494 million) to carry out both the October 7 and upcoming December 16 regional electoral processes.
In contrast, consider that the highest participation rate in recent years in the United States was estimated at only 61.6% of registered voters, comprising only 57.47% of the entire U.S. voting-age population. That was in the 2008 presidential elections.
Amid reports of lower registered-voter turnout this year – an estimated 57.5% – the popular image of the United States as a leader in the development of open, participatory, democratic institutions is not exactly in alignment with current realities on the ground.
In fact, according to data compiled by the international Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the United States trails behind 16 Latin American nations in terms of voter turnout, besting only Colombia (45%) and Honduras (53%), two countries that are not well-regarded for any laudable transparency in the electoral process.
The perennial confusion over voter registration in the United States, which may depress registration and participation levels, could be clarified by uniform national standards regarding voter registration. Reforms might take into consideration similar systemic electoral reforms in Latin America.
Along with observations from the Center for Economic and Policy Studies, the National Lawyers Guild International Committee's observations of Venezuelan popular democracy in action – observations in which I took part – stand in marked contrast with media depictions of Venezuela’s government as autocratic.

On November 10

On this day in ...
... 2007 (5 years ago today), in Santiago, Chile, as a 22-country Ibero-American summit its end, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez called a former Spanish Prime Minister a "fascist" – a charge that provoked the Spanish King, Juan Carlos I, to blurt out:

'¿Por qué no te callas?'

That is,

'Why don't you shut up?'

As the BBC drily noted, the theme for the meeting was "social cohesion."

(Prior November 10 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Chávez vs. Inter-American human rights system

The regional human rights system of the Organization of American States is under attack.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, struggling against both cancer and an emboldened opposition, is making a high-profile push for Venezuela to withdraw from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.
The Presidents of Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have joined Chávez in calling for the creation of an alternative regional human rights system sans United States and Canada.
And even the more centrist Latin American leaders are taking shots.
A group of states including Brazil and Peru have asked the OAS to curb the Commission’s power to issue preliminary measures.
President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil  temporarily withdrew the country’s envoy to the OAS last year after the Commission called on Brazil to halt work on the massive Belo Monte dam.
President Ollanta Humula of Peru accused the Commission of exceeding its mandate by referring to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights a highly polemical case still stalled in Peru’s courts. He seemingly vowed to defy any future Court order for Peru to punish those responsible for the crimes at issue.
Are these threats serious?
► On the one hand, ire from political leaders is nothing new to the Inter-American system, and arguably even a symptom of its effectiveness. Like muckraking journalists, perhaps human rights bodies are at their best when everyone is mad at them.
Much of the pushback, at any rate, is symbolic politics.
► On the other hand, the threat from Chávez (prior IntLawGrrls posts) may be genuine cause for concern.
Chávez, who seems to be losing his battle against cancer, recently constituted a Council of State, the Venezuelan Consejo de Estado, and announced that its first order of business should be Venezuela’s withdrawal from the Inter-American Commission. (credit for above photo of OAS headquarters in Washington, D.C., where Commission meets; credit for photo below of Inter-American Court headquarters in San José, Costa Rica)
 It is not clear what this would mean. As OAS Secretary General Miguel Insulza pointed out, there is no mechanism for withdrawing from the Commission: the Commission was created pursuant to the OAS Charter, so perhaps the only way is to withdraw from the OAS itself.
The Council of State is still studying the matter.
That Venezuela denounced the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States last January shows that Chávez’s threats are not idle.
More troubling still is that Chávez is a regional trendsetter.
His closer allies, including Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, and Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, could try to follow suit. All of them have been targeted by the Commission for their suppression of media freedom of expression, and all have voiced exasperation with a system which, they claim, is unduly influenced by the regional hegemon (that would be the United States, which, though an OAS member, has not given jurisdiction to the Court, and mostly ignores the Commission’s opinions).
Venezuela’s withdrawal would be a serious blow.
As noted in a letter of protest from over 200 concerned academics (among them, IntLawGrrls contributors Caroline Bettinger-López and me, Alexandra Huneeus):

Democracy in Peru: Choosing the lesser evil

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Lisa Laplante, who lived many years in Peru as both a transitional justuce advocate and researcher (see here), and who contributes this guest post)

Peruvians elected their 94th president earlier this month. Anyone following the election probably could not miss the fantastical García Márquez-esque drama that unfolded before the stunned electorate. Upon the segunda vuelta, or second run-off, the citizenry had to choose between:
► Ollanta Humala (right), a former army captain once prosecuted for torture (photo credit), or
► Keiko Fujimori (below left), the debutante daughter of a former authoritarian President -- a father now in prison for human rights abuses. (photo credit)
Those in the human rights community, myself included, felt great dismay at the rising popularity of Keiko, who ran on a ticket that defended the policies of her father Alberto Fujimori. As IntLawGrrls have posted, Fujimori senior became a fugitive in 2000 after the revelation of the vladivideos -- tapes made by his closest advisor, Vladimiro Montesinos, showing him bribing hundreds of powerful elites, including media moguls, judges, and politicians. Despite Peru’s attempt to extradite, for years Fujimori enjoyed a comfortable life in Japan, where he hosted a weekly radio program to keep in communication with his supporters. Keiko had served as his First Lady when her parents divorced, and then in 2005 she became a member of Peru's Congress. She'd always staunchly defended her father, and she rallied the Fujimoristas. These loyal followers contend that the elder Fujimori ended terrorism in Peru, when in reality it was years of police detective work preceding his administration that led to the 1992 arrests of the leaders of the insurgent groups. They also say that he instituted neoliberal reforms that "saved" the economy from hyperinflation blamed on his predecessor, Alan García, who'd served from 1985 to 1990.
Yet even in the heyday of Fujimori’s administration, local human rights activists contested his celebrated image by producing evidence that revealed his underhanded ways. Their strategy of submitting claims to the regional system resulted in emblematic judgments: the Inter-American Court of Human Rights declared that Fujimori’s antiterrorism laws had violated the American Convention on Human Rights.
Eventually, this tireless struggle would be validated by the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established soon after Fujimori’s departure. The truth commissions' Final Report, published in 2003, included a harsh condemnation of Fujimori’s repressive regime and the systematic human rights violations caused by his "war on terror." In particular, it provided damning evidence of:
► Massacres carried out by a paramilitary group formed with Fujimori’s approval, as well as the
► Imprisonment of thousands of innocent people under his draconian anti-terrorism laws.
Not incidentally, Fujimori stole millions of dollars while carrying out his Machiavellian scheme.
The Peruvian truth commission recommended criminal investigations of the crimes attributed to the Fujimori regime, and even handed over files to the Attorney General’s office. Yet Fujimori enjoyed safe haven in Japan until 2005, when he suddenly decided to fly back to South America in anticipation of Peru’s upcoming presidential elections.
This audacious move revealed the degree to which Fujimori still believed in an anachronistic time when former heads of states enjoyed complete immunity (a.k.a. impunity). Quite naively, he underestimated the growing global trend towards accountability. Indeed, during his stop-over in Chile, Fujimori was promptly arrested and, eventually, extradited to stand trial in Peru.
In my own observation of Fujimori’s criminal trial as part of a monitoring project I directed with the support of the Open Society Institute, I observed how Fujimori’s trial only seemed to deepen the division between Peruvians.
To arrive at the courthouse, I had to walk along a half-mile of a blocked-off dirt road lined by large warehouses. Fujimoristas blasted cheer songs over large megaphones and brandished placards that read: "Fujimori es inocente."
At the same time, the human rights community organized colorful rallies with theatrical life-sized puppets and music in support of this historical trial, which made Peru one of the first countries to use wholly domestic courts to prosecute a former head of state for human rights abuses. In April 2009, Fujimori was convicted and ordered to serve twenty-five years in a custom-made penitentiary.
Safely behind bars, Fujimori no longer posed a threat to Peru’s democracy -- or so it seemed.
The ink of the judgment against her father was barely dry before Keiko announced she would run for president. She promised to pardon her father if elected. As I recently explored in my article “The Domestication of International Criminal Law: A Proposal for Expanding the International Criminal Court’s Sphere of Influence,” this threat was not empty, and it revealed a bittersweet paradox of the decentralization of international criminal law.
In paying homage to the principles of legality, the Peruvian judges faithfully protected the due process rights of the defendant by only considering those crimes codified at the time the allegedly illegal acts took place. Eventually, they only convicted Fujimori for the ordinary offenses of murder and kidnapping. Despite viewing the underlying offenses as offenses against humanity, the Peruvian justices decided against charging Fujimori with that international crime -- event though amicus briefs from foreign and national law schools had contended that customary law permitted such a charge. Ultimately, the judges sought to avoid any ex post facto issues that might call into question the legitimacy of the proceedings. (credit for map showing Peru in green)
Even if the issue of Fujimori’s pardon is a less urgent matter -- at least until the next elections when Keiko will undoubtedly run again -- it raises interesting issues.
Scholars argue that pardons can never be granted for crimes against humanity, although as far as I know there has not yet been a case to test this assertion. But certainly presidents exercise their right to pardon criminals convicted of ordinary offenses on a regular basis. Thus, Peru’s experience shows that if a population votes for a certain candidate, it may also hold the power to unravel any justice gained as part of a transitional justice undertaking.
For that reason, I watched the polls anxiously, wondering if the Peruvian population would essentially vote for impunity.
I experienced deep relief when Keiko conceded defeat -- although she only trailed in the ballots by a 2% margin. But a second later, I wondered what new black-magic genre of drama awaited Peru, given that Humala lost his first bid for presidency in 2006 because of the same type of panic reaction. Back then, Peruvians worried about Humala’s failed military revolt in 2000, the spate of legal claims of torture, and his populist leanings that tied him to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Then as now, voters were backed into a corner, given that the other candidate was Alan García, who, in an earlier stint as Peru's President, nearly destroyed the economy and led an anti-terrorism campaign that resulted in the highest rates of disappearances in the world. At that time, García had appeared to be “the least bad.” Yet his election caused me to wonder what progress really had been gained by Peru's truth commission.
Fast forward five years.
This month Peruvians found Humala, who is set to take office at the end of July, to be the "least evil" option. Notably, the majority of those who voted for him did so in protest against an economic status quo that has kept them stuck in the same socio-economic inequalities (despite Peru’s booming economy) that, in the view of the truth commission, helped to ignite the internal armed conflict thirty years ago, when insurgent groups promised to reverse social injustices. In similar fashion, populist candidates in Peru often promise to finally bring equality to the most marginalized Peruvians: the working class, campesinos and indigenous peoples. In fact, this same population voted for Fujimori in 1990, when he was a virtual political unknown, because he promised to save them from economic hardship.
And, well, we know how that unhappy tale ended…

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'... I think the fact that Venezuela has participated in the process so far indicates that they are reluctantly planning to abide by the decision.'

-- IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Andrea K. Bjorklund (below left), Professor of Law at the University of California-Davis, in an ABA Journal article entitled "Exxon Mobil’s Dispute with Venezuela Has Global Implications." Andrea's quote explained the position of the Venezuelan government in Exxon Mobil v. Petroleos de Venezuela SA, a dispute stemming from the 2007 nationalization, on orders of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez , of in-country holdings of 2 mega-oil-companies, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips. (credit for 2007 photo at Venezuelan oil site) A 3-judge panel from the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, a Washington-based institution of the World Bank, is hearing the matter. Exxon Mobil, in the words of the ABA Journal's reporter, "quietly restructured its Venezuela assets through a Dutch holding company" in 2005, has invoked a Venezuela-Netherlands bilateral investment treaty, or BIT. At stake are billions of dollars -- and what Andrea calls the "'de facto precedent'" likely to be issued on questions of proper compensation for expropriated investment.

On November 27

On this day in ...

... 1967, French President Charles de Gaulle announced that he would veto Britain's application to become a member of the European Economic Community. It was the 2d time that de Gaulle had said "Non," even though the other 5 members, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy and Germany, were willing to begin negotiations to admit Britain. Britain would not be accepted until 1969, after de Gaulle had fallen from power.

... 1992, in Caracas, "[d]isgruntled air force units, allied with civilian leftists," attempted a military coup against the President of Venezuela (flag at right). The attempt failed. But the President was removed on account of corruption charges several months later, and eventually a leader of the 1992 unrest, Hugo Chávez, would gain power in the country.

Adiós a Fidel Castro

Until now he was the longest-serving leader of any nation-state in the world; indeed, he's shown at left addressing the U.N. General Assembly in 1960, nearly a half-century ago. This morning that speaker, Cuba's Fidel Castro, resigned and transferred power to his brother, Raúl Castro, at 76 the younger of the 2 by 5 years.
Here's a roundup of some of the commentary already online:
La Prensa, Havana, has the full text of Castro's resignation, in Spanish. And the English version of Castro's address to his "dear compatriots" is available at The New York Times.
Le Monde, Paris, reports on dissidents' "mistrust" and "hope."
Politicos have weighed in, too, among them British Foreign Secretary David Milband and, in the United States, President George W. Bush, Democratic Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and Republican Presidential candidate John McCain. Not a peep so far on Mike Huckabee's website -- nor anything yet found on the web from leaders more friendly to Castro, such as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.
IntLawGrrls' prior posts on Cuba, a number recounting aspects of that country's decades-long tensions with the United States, are here.