Inter-American Court condemns Nicaragua for "damage to communities" after commissioning China to build interoceanic canal project

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) accused the Nicaraguan Ortega-Murillo regime on Monday of violating the rights of indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in the Caribbean in its project to build an interoceanic canal, commissioned to a Chinese company and canceled in May.

The canal would have linked the Atlantic and the Pacific, similar to the Panama Canal, which has become an invaluable shipping route connecting to the two major bodies of water.

“Nicaragua violated the political rights, to participate in cultural life, to property, to prior, free and informed consultation, to judicial guarantees, to judicial protection and to a healthy environment” of the indigenous and Afro-descendant communities of the municipality from Bluefields, on the Caribbean coast, 360 kilometers east of Managua, the accusation indicates.

The Inter-American Court, based in San José, Costa Rica, said that the regime “injured the rights of the communities concerned over their territory" by not taking them into account in the assignment of authorities for the project and by approving the concession “without prior, free and informed consultation process.”

Furthermore, the Nicaraguan dictatorship also did not carry out a study of the environmental and social impact in the territories through which the canal must pass, which foresees entrances into the Brito River, on the Pacific coast and near the mouth of the Punta Gorda River, in the Caribbean.

The road would cross Lake Nicaragua, the largest in Central America.

Nicaragua “issued a title on the community property of the indigenous black Creole community of Bluefields” irregularly and without taking into account the community itself, the Court highlighted.

The ruling determined as reparation measures that Nicaragua return the property through the delivery of titles to the affected communities so that they can be delimited, demarcated and cleaned up by the State.

In addition, the regime must “guarantee peaceful coexistence within the territory” between indigenous people and "settlers", provide a "free consultation process" in the event of a new concession and create a fund for the benefit of the affected communities “to finance diverse nature.”

The National Assembly of Nicaragua, controlled by the Ortega-Murillo regime, canceled in May the ambitious 12-year-old interoceanic canal project commissioned the Chinese group Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Co. Limited (HKND Group), owned by the Chinese businessman Wang Jing, for a term of 50 extendable years.

About 10 years after it broke ground to build the canal, Nicaragua has canceled the concession to complete the project because critics said would displace rural communities and endanger the environment.

After a symbolic “ground-breaking” in 2014, no work was done on the canal. At one stage, crews broke ground on access roads near the canal but there was no digging for the waterway.

“The proposed $50bn, 172-mile (278km) canal across this Central American country was long viewed as a joke that later turned deadly serious. The canal and its potential effect on the environment became a symbol of the odd and arbitrary nature of President Daniel Ortega’s increasingly repressive regime,” according to a May 8, 2024 report published by the British Guardian newspaper.