Marco Rubio has been trying to emphasize efforts to renew Venezuela’s Supreme Court (TSJ) despite the slow pace these took until recently. After all, this institution would be key in any political transition not only because of its role as the highest court of law, but also as the overseer of the entire Judicial Branch, after the 1999 Constitution axed the Judiciary Council.
The current version of the TSJ made some headlines by announcing a slight change, a small but relevant group of courts. In an October 13 plenary resolution, the TSJ suppressed the jurisdiction of four control tribunals in Caracas specialized in terrorism. Ordinary control tribunals would assume their role.
For context: in our criminal justice system, a control tribunal conducts the investigation of a criminal case, supervising the role of the prosecutor general’s office and handling the case until it finds whether charges are worth a trial, held by a different court.
Foro Penal VP Gonzalo Himiob said that the TSJ resolution only took away the role of four specific courts and nothing else.
Many first read this decision as a concrete result of talks between the Rodríguez delegation and opposition negotiators. Several NGOs warned that this is just a small concession and doesn’t change the fact that most of the anti-terrorism jurisdiction remains in place.
Alí Daniels, a lawyer and director of NGO Acceso a la Justicia, said that these special courts are unconstitutional from their origin, as the TSJ created them unilaterally back in 2012 despite not being established in the Organic Law Against Organized Crime and Terrorism Financing. Gonzalo Himiob, vice president of NGO Foro Penal, said that the TSJ’s resolution only took away the role of four specific courts and nothing else.
Not enough
Human rights organizations in Venezuela have denounced for years the existence of this special kind of courts and its role in the overall structure of repression. Among them is Provea, which tracks this subject. To discuss the effects of this development, Caracas Chronicles talked with enforceability coordinator Marino Alvarado.
“Terrorism courts began to take strong relevance in 2017,” Alvarado says. “In the previous protests of 2014, very few cases of demonstrators were charged by the Public Ministry in those courts. In 2017 and then in 2024, with the wave of repression after the presidential election of July 28, there is a massively indiscriminate and arbitrary use of the terrorism court jurisdiction. Between 2024 and 2025 alone, these courts processed more than 2,000 people for events not related with the Organic Law Against Organized Crime and Terrorism Financing.”
In 2019, Provea published a report titled “Every Enemy is Presumed Guilty”, written by lawyer and law professor Fernando M. Fernández, detailing the overall scheme of arbitrary detentions.
“The main characteristic of those terrorism courts is the erasing of everything established in both the Constitution and the Organic Penal Process Code (COPP) regarding due process and access to legal defense,” Alvarado told us, adding that in anti-terrorism courts “erased the presumption of innocence was erased, transforming it into the presumption of guilt, because the treatment given to any person detained in the context of the systematic repression is that of being an enemy. Therefore, the principles of Enemy Criminal Law are applied.”
That concept is also known as Feindstrafrecht, originally coined by German criminal law professor Günther Jakobs in 1985.
“The Venezuelan Supreme Court not only tolerated, but promoted abuses through several sentences,” Marino Alvarado affirms.
International rights groups have shared the concern. Some have even done their own investigations on this troubling issue: earlier this year, the International Council of Jurists (ICJ) released the paper “The Use of Anti-Terrorism Courts to Suppress Dissent in Venezuela.”
The ICJ found that “specialized anti-terrorism courts fail to meet the requirements of a competent, independent, and impartial tribunal,” as judges assigned to preside them have provisional status and therefore are “highly susceptible to executive pressure, undermining their ability to rule impartially or to address human rights violations committed against defendants.”
The ICJ also questions the main legal arguments that justify the function of these courts, as it relies on overly broad and vague definitions of terrorism. They claim this “contravenes the principle of legality, which requires that terrorism-related offences be defined narrowly and clearly, so as to limit them to conduct that is genuinely terrorist in nature, consistent with international standards.”
Beyond that, there is the matter of responsibility among the Venezuelan State’s institutions for human rights violations caused and/or exacerbated by such anti-terrorism courts.
For the next round of talks, negotiators have agreed to review the definition and typification of terrorism in force at the moment.
“There is complicity in those crimes against humanity by the Prosecutor General’s Office, formerly led by Tarek William Saab and the Ombudsman’s Office then headed by Alfredo Díaz, besides the magistrates of both the Constitutional and Criminal Justice Chambers (of the TSJ) who could have stopped the abuses,” Alvarado notes. “The Supreme Court not only tolerated, but promoted abuses through several sentences.”
Larry Devoe and Eglée González Lobato replaced Saab and Díaz this year, though their work in addressing past abuses has been nonexistent so far. Still, Alvarado recognizes that the TSJ’s resolution brings something positive: “It starts to recognize the abuse of the counter-terrorist jurisdiction.” He warns that more steps are needed: “The State must not only recognize the abuse but also release those who are still processed by those courts and compensate those detained, disappeared or those who faced due process violations as a consequence of being subjected to those jurisdictions.”
Multiple voices have called for the complete repeal of the law giving cover to those courts as well, something that the third round of discussions between the interim government and the Dinorah Figuera-led delegation noticed. For the next round of talks, negotiators have agreed to review the definition and typification of terrorism in force at the moment.
