Inauguration of Palestine Park in Managua, Nicaragua. Photo: César Pérez.
“Nicaragua expresses its unchanging solidarity with the heroic Palestinian people, who continue to face suffering, occupation, destruction and displacement perpetrated by the Zionist government of Israel and its occupying forces,” reads a statement from Nicaragua’s government released on July 29.
The declaration condemned Israel’s renewed attacks, calling them an “unacceptable escalation of violence against the Palestinian people,” and repudiated “the continuous, growing violations of international and humanitarian law, as well as Israel’s attempts to criminalize the Palestinian population who seek only to protect their families, homes and livelihoods.”
This statement is Nicaragua’s most recent demonstration of solidarity with Palestine in its long history of friendship with the Palestinian people: Nicaragua was the first Central American country to establish diplomatic ties with Palestine. In 1980, just one year after the triumph of the Sandinista Popular Revolution, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat made a historic visit to Nicaragua which marked the beginning of diplomatic relations between the State of Palestine and the Republic of Nicaragua.
Nicaragua leads South-South solidarity
From that time, the two countries have maintained friendship which has strengthened since the Israeli genocide in Gaza began. On the global stage, Nicaragua has been at the forefront of the south-south mobilization of support for Palestine: reaffirming solidarity with Palestine on October 7, 2023; sending its foreign minister to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian authorities in December 2023; signing on in February 2024 as the first of 18 countries to intervene on behalf of South Africa in its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ); and on March 1, 2024, bringing charges against Germany at the ICJ for aiding and abetting genocide by providing political, financial and military support to Israel and by defunding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
Nicaragua’s pressure on Germany at the ICJ has already leveraged positive results for Palestine: as of April 2024, Germany reversed its policy on stopping UNRWA funding to Gaza and declared it has resumed aid. This March, Germany’s Foreign Ministry announced it was withdrawing support for Israel in the South Africa case in order to focus on its defense in the legal proceedings initiated by Nicaragua.
Nicaragua v. United States
Nicaragua, a country the size of New York state with a population of just under seven million people, is one of the countries in the world with the most experience in the ICJ. In fact, in 1986 the World Court ruled in Nicaragua’s favor in a landmark case against the United States over the Contra War.
Immediately following the ousting of US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza by young Sandinista revolutionaries in 1979, the US created, financed and directed a “counterrevolutionary” force known as the contras. While the Nicaraguan Sandinista Revolution taught its illiterate population to read and write and made health care and education free, it was simultaneously fighting US-armed contra guerillas. The contras attacked civilian targets that represented the gains of the Revolution–health care workers, teachers, schools, and farming cooperatives–killing 50,000 in country of just three million people at the time.
“The situation progressed so much that in 1983 there was an attack in our main port of Corinto and over 1.6 million gallons of gas exploded,” remembered Ambassador Carlos Argüello, Nicaraguan’s agent to the International Court of Justice, during a video conference from the Netherlands on May 4, 2024. “This act was carried out by the CIA under the direction of the US.”
A few months later, the US placed underwater explosive devices in Nicaraguan ports without notifying other nations; a UK national was killed.
“It was astounding,” remembered Argüello. “Publicly in Congress they were discussing how much money to give the contras, and there was no question of international law…So that is why we went to the World Court, because it wasn’t simply a matter of the most powerful nation doing whatever it wants, [we needed] to remind the world that international law exists.”
In 1986 the ICJ handed down its verdict in the case of Nicaragua vs. the United States, convicting the US of violating the fundamental principles of general and customary international law, making the US the only country in the world to be convicted by the ICJ of massive human rights violations. The Court ordered the US to pay reparations, which it has never done. To this day, the US has an outstanding debt to the Nicaraguan people estimated at $12 billion in 1988, now worth at least $36.5 billion.
Nicaragua case a turning point
Speaking on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the ICJ ruling in the Nicaragua case, Augusto Zamora Rodríguez, former Nicaraguan Ambassador to Spain and professor of international law who worked on Nicaragua v. United States, explained that the case marked a turning point in international law.
“[It] left the United States stripped of legal arguments. And it stripped them bare forever, because what was said about Nicaragua in 1986 applies today to Iran; it applies today to countries under attack, such as so many in Africa and some in Latin America. And it also serves to remind governments that applaud these kinds of policies that they are absolutely illegal—not because someone says so voluntarily or out of conviction, but because the United Nations’ principal judicial body said so.”
Zamora went on to highlight that the precedent set in the Nicaragua case can be availed of by other countries suffering unjust attacks.
“In that sense, our country, the Revolution, and the Sandinista government rendered an enormous service not only to the country but also to the international community and to the world’s poor. We left them with a ruling they can rely on, and I am certain that in the case of the genocide in Gaza—the barbarity that Israel has been perpetrating against the Palestinian people for 80 years—when the Court rules on the genocide case, it will cite the Nicaragua ruling more than once.”
In Zamora’s view, the Nicaragua case is more pertinent than ever. “…The Nicaragua ruling has not only lost none of its relevance,” he said, “but continues to gain in significance and has established an essential legal framework for the defense of the rights of peoples and weak nations—who are, in fact, the ones who truly need to invoke this right…It is already a different world, but that world, I believe, will find in this Court’s ruling a quite competent and solid framework for building the new multipolar order that international society needs.”
Another landmark case
Similarly, the case Nicaragua has brought against Germany in the ICJ is also now being described as a “landmark case.” Nicaragua was unable to bring charges against the US for aiding the Gaza genocide because the US withdrew from accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ. Bringing charges against Germany, however, is significant not only because Germany remains Israel’s second-largest arms supplier after the US, but also because Germany’s far right is currently seeking even closer ties with Israel: recently Germany’s upper house approved a bill to criminalize the denial of Israel’s “right to exist,” punishable by up to five years in prison.
Although any legal proceedings in the World Court advance very slowly, there is now new movement in Nicaragua v. Germany: on August 1, the International Court of Justice announced that it will hold public hearings September 7-10 on preliminary objections raised by Germany challenging jurisdiction and admissibility in the case brought by Nicaragua.
Despite being a small nation from the global south, Nicaragua will certainly be drawing on its long experience with the ICJ and its consistent adherence to international law to defend the Palestinian people at the World Court.
“Nicaragua’s people will continue to raise their voices in favor of the Palestinian cause and cry out for justice and peace, for the freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people,” read Managua’s recent statement. “The two-state solution is an international demand and the only way to a just and lasting peace.”
(Popular Resistance) by Becca Renk Foster
Becca Renk
Becca Renk grew up in North Idaho and has lived in Nicaragua since 2001 working in sustainable community development in Ciudad Sandino with Jubilee House Community and its project Center for Development in Central America.
