He advocates maintaining the requirement for verification of results and says that the EU will wait for the Supreme Court’s ruling
The High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Policy, José Borrell, criticised this Monday that the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, has gone to the Venezuelan Supreme Court to “defend him” after having declared himself the winner without publishing the minutes of the presidential elections about which the international community has raised suspicions of fraud. “The height of sarcasm”, he summed up.
“Maduro has appealed to the Court, he has appealed to the courts to defend him, which is the height of sarcasm, and we are waiting for the Supreme Court of Venezuela to issue the ruling,” explained the High Representative.
This is what the socialist leader said at a press conference during the opening of the XXIII edition of the course ‘Quo Vadis Europa?’, which he himself directs at the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) in Santander.
In this regard, he said he did not know “what sentence the Venezuelan judicial body is going to issue” since “its function is not to count the election results.” This task, he recalled, corresponds to the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Venezuela –controlled by the Chavista government–, so, in his opinion, “Maduro does not need to go to court” and does need to publish the electoral records so that the international community can proceed to their “verification.”
In his opinion, the attitude of the Venezuelan president raises doubts because “he insists on saying that he has won and does not want to understand that, for the international community, without verification there is no acceptance of results.” “Imagine if here in Spain the electoral authority published partial results and did not justify them, what would we think?” he asked.
In this way, he said he hoped that the international community would maintain its “demand for verification of results” since the Venezuelan opposition led by Edmundo González and María Corina Machado has published results “radically different from those proclaimed by Maduro” gathering “more than 80 percent of the minutes of the electoral tables.”
THE REPRESSION INCREASES
In this context, he has described the situation in Venezuela as “dramatic” and has expressed his expectation “to see what happens in the next few days” because “the repression” of the Chavista government “is intensifying” and “there are already more than 2,000 people arrested.”
He also asserted that the European Union’s position regarding the conflict is to maintain the demand that Maduro publish the results while “there is an ongoing negotiation” and “waiting” for the ruling issued by the Supreme Court of the Caribbean country. “Venezuela could enter into a serious crisis, we are all trying to prevent this from happening,” Borrell added.
Regarding the proposal of “some Latin American country” to repeat elections and share power between the government and the opposition, he said that he does not know “how to do that” and insisted that “nothing will surely be done until the Supreme Court speaks.”
