US owes Nicaragua Reparations
US owes Nicaragua reparations, must implement 1986 Int’l Court of Justice ruling
37 years after a 1986 International Court of Justice ruling, the United States still refuses to pay Nicaragua the reparations it legally owes. Today, the Nicaraguan government is demanding that the United Nations take action.
Geopolitical Economy by Ben Norton • June 28, 2023
The International Court of Justice in the Hague ruled in 1986 that the US government had violated international law in its attacks on Nicaragua and that it owed the Central American nation reparations.
June 27, 2023 was the 37th anniversary of this ruling, and Washington still to this day refuses to pay Nicaragua the money that it legally owes it.
The International Court of Justice is the judicial arm of the United Nations.
In 1986, the top UN court determined that the US repeatedly violated international law by:
- training, arming, equipping, financing, and supplying the Contra paramilitaries in Nicaragua;
- attacking Nicaraguan infrastructure;
- putting mines in Nicaragua’s ports;
- imposing an embargo on Nicaragua; and
- encouraging the Contras to commit atrocities that violate international humanitarian law.
Nicaragua’s current government has publicly called on the US to meet its obligations under international law.
This June 26, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega sent a letter to UN Secretary General António Guterres demanding that Washington pay reparations.
“There exists a historical debt with the Nicaraguan people that 37 years later has not been settled by the United States,” Ortega said. “It is an obligation clearly established in a final judgment of the highest international judicial authority, the International Court of Justice.”
The Nicaraguan president wrote:
The list of direct damages includes human damages, direct material damages, defense expenses, losses caused by the embargo. Also other damages such as social losses in education, health, work, social security, as well as potential losses for development and production.
From all points of view, the nation’s right to development was irreparably affected.
The estimated value of the damages in March 1988, the date on which the Report was presented along with all supporting documentation, was estimated at $12 billion. This amount does not reflect damages after said date, the consequences of which are currently verifiable.
For example, to this day, the country’s social security system continues to pay pensions to those injured in the war and their relatives, including those who were part of the counterrevolutionary forces illegally financed by the United States, which never assumed the social cost of said illegalities.
Adjusted for inflation, $12 billion in 1988 would be more than $31 billion in 2023.
The current Nicaraguan president wrote to the UN:
Nicaragua never received anything to which it was not entitled (such as the right not to be attacked) in exchange for discontinuing the trial before the Court.
Instead of receiving compensation as it morally and legally corresponds, Nicaragua continues to be the object of a new type of aggression. It is in this context, in which Nicaragua has once again been the victim of attacks, now euphemistically called sanctions, and the victim of an attempted coup, that the people of Nicaragua remember the historic sentence of the International Court of Justice.
…
Nicaragua takes this opportunity to recall that the judgments of the International Court of Justice are final and of inescapable compliance, and therefore the United States has the legal obligation to comply with the reparations ordered by the judgment of June 27, 1986.
“Therefore thus saith the Lord God: As I live, surely Mine oath that he hath despised and My covenant that he hath broken, even it will I recompense upon his own head.
“And I will spread My net upon him, and he shall be taken in My snare, and I will bring him to Babylon and will plead with him there for his trespass that he hath trespassed against Me
“And all his fugitives with all his troops shall fall by the sword, and they that remain shall be scattered toward all winds; and ye shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken it” Ezekiel 17:19-21
Joel
A Prophecy of Esau and Jacob 