EUAA COI Report. Country Focus

This EUAA COI Country Focus report on Venezuela is intended to provide an overview of the key relevant issues for the assessment of claims for international protection. This report is an update to the EUAA COI Report on Venezuela: Country Focus (2020), which should be read in conjunction with this report. This report is thus intended to capture a selection of the main issues relevant to international protection in the assessment of claims from Venezuela.

This report structured as follows:

- Chapter 1: Provides an overview of the main developments and structures in the justice sector, security forces, and around the issue of monitoring of the population by the state.

- Chapter 2: Deals with changes to the humanitarian situation.

- Chapter 3: Covers the security situation in detail, including problems of extortion, presence and activities of main armed actors, as well as the security situation at the border and in the Mining Arc of the Orinoco.

- Chapter 4: Covers the main profiles that may be relevant for international protection, including political opponents, demonstrators, journalists, government employees and deserters from the security forces, among others.

The drafting of this report was finalised on 25 October 2023. Any event taking place after this date is not included in this report.

This report was drafted by COI experts from the EUAA Country of Origin Information Sector.

The following national asylum and migration departments reviewed this report:

- France, Office français de protection des réfugiés et apatrides (OFPRA), Division de l’information, de la documentation et des recherches (DIDR) ;

- Netherlands, Immigration and Naturalisation Service, Office for Country Information and Language Analysis (OCILA);

- Canada, Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), Research Directorate (RD).

Furthermore, this report was reviewed by an external expert, Tamara Taraciuk Broner. Ms. Taraciuk Broner is director of the Peter D. Bell Rule of Law Program at the Inter-American Dialogue. Before joining the Dialogue, she worked at Human Rights Watch for 17 years, where she covered Venezuela and was later acting Americas director. Ms. Broner has carried out extensive field research throughout Latin America documenting human rights violations and has an extensive research and publication record on issues such as judicial independence, freedom of speech, discrimination, and harassment of civil society organisations in the region.

This report was written according to the EUAA COI Report Methodology (2023) and the EUAA COI Writing and Referencing Guide (2023).