The judicial decision has been preceded and accompanied by legislative changes. The government-controlled National Assembly (Asamblea Nacional) amended Article 21 of the Constitution on 9 February, adding a clause which strips the “traitors to the homeland” (traidores a la patria) of their nationality (“Los traidores a la patria pierden la calidad de nacional nicaragüense”), thereby undermining the guarantee of nationality contained in Article 20 of the Constitution. This constitutional reform is complemented by two ordinary laws. Ley 1055 was already adopted on 22 December 2020 and regulates the loss of nationality in line with Article 21 of the Constitution. The more recent Law 1145 of 10 February 2023 (i.e. one day after the deportation of the 222 dissidents to the U.S.!) authorizes, in its Article 2, the loss of the nationality of those persons who have been convicted pursuant to Law 1055, inter alia for treason (traición). Interestingly, the government did not even wait for the entry into force of the constitutional amendment (requiring a second legislative decision, see here) and applied Law 1145 retroactively, at least with regard to the 222 deported citizens. In other words, Nicaraguan nationals have been deported!
The removal of the nationality, first of all, violates the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness which Nicaragua joined with effect of 29 July 2013, the same Daniel Ortega being President. This Convention only allows for a loss of nationality (by renunciation, removal etc.) if the person concerned does not become stateless (Articles 5, 6, 7(1)(a) and (6), 8(1)). Furthermore, the deprivation of nationality is only allowed in limited and specific circumstances (Article 8(2)(a) in connection with Article 7 (4),(5); Article 8(2)(b): obtained by misrepresentation or fraud). Otherwise, a State must retain its right to deprive a person of its nationality, at the time of joining the Convention, for specific grounds (Article 8(3)), namely:
(a) that, inconsistently with his duty of loyalty to the Contracting State, the person
(i) has, in disregard of an express prohibition by the Contracting State rendered or continued to render services to, or received or continued to receive emoluments from, another State, or
(ii) has conducted himself in a manner seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the State;
(b) that the person has taken an oath, or made a formal declaration, of allegiance to another State, or given definite evidence of his determination to repudiate his allegiance to the Contracting State.
Nicaragua has made no declaration or reservation to that effect (see 99 acres database here and the respective Decreto de Aprobación here). At any rate, according to Article 9, “[A] Contracting State may not deprive any person or group of persons of their nationality on racial, ethnic, religious or political grounds.” Thus, the kind of deprivation of nationality at issue here, i.e., as part of political persecution, is explicitly prohibited.
The measure also violates the right to nationality pursuant to Article 20 of the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR), especially its para. 3: “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality.” So far, this provision has only become relevant once, namely in the case of the Israeli-Peruvian businessman Baruch Ivcher. In another (prominent) Latin American case of a removal of nationality, that of Chilean politician and diplomat Orlando Letelier of the Allende government (see Decreto 588 of 2 September 1976 of the Pinochet dictatorship), there was no legal remedy, not least because Letelier was later assassinated by the Chilean secret police DINA in Washington D.C. on 21 September 1976. Ivcher obtained Peruvian nationality in 1984, renouncing his Israeli nationality but then lost it pursuant to an executive order (Resolución Directoral) of 11 July 1997 during the Fujimori government. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) found a violation of Article 20 of the Convention (here, para 86 ff.), stressing the importance of nationality as a human right which offers a minimum legal protection (para. 86, 87) and arguing that the removal was arbitrary as, inter alia, demonstrated by the fact that the administrative authority issuing the mentioned executive order was inferior to the one conceding the nationality in the first place (para. 93-96). To be sure, compared to this case, the removal of the nationality of more than 300 citizens is not only much more severe in quantitative terms, but the political nature of the measure is also much more evident than in the Ivcher case.