The ruling by Venezuela’s Supreme Court on a disputed presidential election will be “final,” court president Carilia Rodriguez said Saturday during a hearing on the July 28 vote.
“The court continues the evaluation it began on Aug. 5, 2024, with the aim of rendering a final judgment… Its decisions are final and binding,” Rodriguez said.
Most observers say the high court is loyal to the government of Nicolas Maduro, which won the election by a narrow margin.
Opposition leaders say their candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won by a landslide, and have presented official tallies from polling places as proof.
Maduro himself called on the High Court on August 1 to “validate” a victory that his opponents say was fraudulent.
This week the court heard arguments from all the candidates, including Maduro — except Gonzalez Urrutia, who has said he fears arrest.
He has not made a public appearance in more than a week, while prominent opposition leader Maria Corina Machado — a former presidential candidate who was barred from running this time — has said she is in hiding.
The National Electoral Council (CNE) confirmed Maduro’s victory on August 2, saying he had received 52 percent of the vote, but it refused to release exact figures from polling sites, saying the data had been hacked.
In contrast, the opposition released printed figures – whose validity Maduro denied – according to which González Urrutia received 67 percent of the vote.
The opposition and many observers say the alleged hacking of the results was a ploy hatched by the government to prevent election documents from being published.
Maduro on Friday rejected the accusations, saying there had been a “brutal” hacking, with “30 million attacks per minute on the CNE and Venezuela’s electronic systems.”
Opposition lawyer Perkins Rocha said that by turning to the high court, Maduro was effectively admitting that “nobody trusts” the CNE, adding that “Maduro knows he can trust the one (court) that kneels before him.”
According to human rights groups, 24 people have been killed in post-election protests and Maduro says 2,200 people have been arrested.
He has overseen national collapse, including an 80 percent drop in the once-prosperous oil-rich country’s gross domestic product, amid domestic economic mismanagement and international sanctions.