Cuba is now the country with the most convictions by the UN WGAD since 2019
Cuba is now the country with the most convictions by the United Nations (UN) Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) since 2019, according to a recent report by the human rights organisation Prisoners Defenders.
As Prisoners Defenders points out, from 2019 to 2025, the WGAD has detected 93 arbitrary detentions in Cuba of people who were arrested, as the institution reports, for exercising internationally protected rights, such as freedom of expression, religious freedom, the right to peaceful assembly and demonstration, and civic participation, without due process, and with many human rights violations and crimes against humanity, such as arbitrary imprisonment, torture, persecution, forced disappearance and other acts classified as inhuman by human rights activists.
The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, through an arbitration process in which Cuba has had full rights to effective defence, has just ruled that 49 prisoners who were victims of the 11 July demonstrations, all of whose cases were presented and defended before the body against the Cuban regime by Prisoners Defenders (Complaint Case 23 and Complaint Case 149, both from 2021), were arbitrarily detained for political and ideological reasons and without due process or defence, in addition to suffering multiple other crimes against humanity, such as forced disappearance and isolation, torture and multiple and very serious violations of their human rights, according to the report presented by Prisoners Defenders.
In the two final rulings (Op. 46/2025 and Op. 57/2025), the United Nations body exposes these violations and urges Cuba to immediately release and exonerate the 49 and compensate them for damages. With these 49 new cases, the United Nations Working Group ranks Cuba as the world's leading country for arbitrary detention since 2019, with 93 cases between 2019 and 2025, while the second country is Egypt, with 73 cases of arbitrary detention. In addition to this, Cuba is the only country in the world that has been condemned in three mass Opinions (more than 10 victims), totalling 66 cases spread over three opinions submitted by Prisoners Defenders and resolved with condemnation by the WGAD in just 1 year and 8 months (13/2024, 46/2025 and 57/2025). Cuba, Turkey and Nicaragua are, in that order, the only three countries in the world with the most mass convictions of this type. Of the 93 cases in Cuba, Prisoners Defenders was the rapporteur and defender of 81 of them before the body (87%). Prisoners Defenders, for its part, has prepared, presented, conducted and won the rulings in 81 of these 93 cases (87%), as explained by this human rights organisation.
The WGAD has corroborated that the Cuban regime perpetrated six of the eleven possible crimes against humanity defined by the Rome Statute against these persons deprived of their liberty.
In all cases, the WGAD carries out arbitration work, allowing the accused state to exercise its right to defence, which Cuba has done in all cases up to 2025.
The process is similar to an expedited judicial process, in which a group of experts from various countries, endorsed and selected by the United Nations, conduct a thorough analysis of the positions and evidence of both parties to the dispute, Prisoners Defenders on the one hand and the Cuban government on the other, and ultimately issue verdicts, similar to a court ruling, which they call ‘Opinions.’ The opinions of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention are public documents that assess whether a case of deprivation of liberty constitutes arbitrary detention and, if so, classify the case and recommend that the State take measures such as the release of the person.
Even so, and despite the fact that the State Party has more information and details than anyone else about the ongoing proceedings, Cuba defended itself and lost all the arbitration proceedings on the cases presented by Prisoners Defenders until this occasion, according to this human rights organisation. Now, in 2025, with 49 new cases presented alongside more conclusive documentary evidence, the regime did not venture to refute the accusations this time and tacitly agreed with the arguments and evidence presented by Prisoners Defenders, according to this entity. However, the Working Group did carry out a thorough review of the evidence, verifying and adopting each of our arguments after this review process, which took almost two years, and the regime's final tacit acceptance of our arguments, according to Prisoners Defenders in its report on the matter.
With the regime's conviction for the 93 arbitrarily detained persons, ruled between 2019 and 2025, Cuba ranks as the country with the highest number of victims of arbitrary detention recognised by the WGAD Opinions in the last six years.
