The Organization of American States (OAS), a regional human rights body, has voted to convene an urgent meeting of foreign ministers over Nicaragua, declaring that representative democracy “no longer exists” in the country.

On Wednesday, the OAS Permanent Council approved a resolution calling for the meeting by a lopsided vote of 29 to 1, with one abstention and two countries absent, according to a post on the social media platform X.

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The resolution calls developments in Nicaragua “a problem of an urgent nature and of common interest to the American States”.

It invokes some of the OAS Charter’s heaviest tools – Articles 61, 62 and 63 – whose provisions are often reserved for emergencies that demand a collective response.

The council’s president has also been instructed to draft a meeting agenda “as soon as possible”.

The vote was held in response to developments under the co-presidency of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, a husband-and-wife leadership team.

Ortega, who led Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, returned to power in 2007, and in the years since, he has been accused of consolidating power at the expense of human rights.

In July, for instance, his government unveiled a new set of constitutional reforms that would extend his presidential term from six to seven years.

The changes would also ban opposition figures from public elections if they are considered “traitors to the homeland”. They changes would also allow the country’s electoral council to dissolve any political party that receives funding from abroad.

Ortega suggested in a speech that month that no more elections would be held for opposition members “to try to seize the government”.

Nicaragua’s legislature is due to vote on the proposed changes in September. The OAS’s decision comes ahead of the expected vote.

Nicaragua, however, is no longer a party to the OAS. It announced its plans to break from the regional organisation in 2021 and completed the process two years later, in 2023.

The OAS has previously criticised the Ortega government for its efforts to weaken Nicaragua’s democratic institutions.

The United Nations has raised similar alarms. In July, UN human rights chief Volker Turk warned that blocking elections would further erode Nicaragua’s rule of law.

Turk added that there have been “severe restrictions on fundamental freedoms” under Ortega and his wife, Murillo, who was elevated from vice president to co-president in 2025.

Critics have observed that crackdowns on dissent intensified after the outbreak of student-led protests in 2018, which the government responded to with deadly force. Hundreds of people died in the subsequent clashes.

In the years since, Ortega has jailed critics, shut down independent media outlets, shuttered nonprofits and dissolved opposition parties.

In 2023, in one of his starkest moves yet, his government loaded more than 200 political prisoners onto a plane and flew them out of the country. They were subsequently stripped of their Nicaraguan citizenship, effectively banishing them from the country.

Ortega, meanwhile, has defended his actions as necessary to combat outside influences, including the United States.