Venezuela's interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, announced that she will contact the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, on Monday to request an official review of the number of detainees released in the country. "I will ask, through his office, to review the lists of those released in Venezuela," Rodríguez said on Friday, January 23, during a speech broadcast on state television, Venezolana de Televisión.
The government in Caracas, which on January 8 announced – through the Speaker of Parliament Jorge Rodríguez, the brother of the interim president – the release of a significant number of political prisoners, claims to have freed over 600 prisoners so far, including those released in December. However, this figure has been disputed by many NGOs, starting with Amnesty International and the Venezuelan Prison Observatory (OVP), which reported today on its official X account that “people deprived of their liberty whose cases were not known to the public have been released.”
According to Efe, the OVP maintains its own documented number of releases and puts the total at 171, a higher figure than that indicated by the NGO Foro Penal and the opposition coalition Unitary Democratic Platform, which respectively speak of 154 and 170 political prisoners released since January 8.
