Venezuela and the Collapse of a World Order Built on Treaties

TMS PEACE JOURNALISM, 12 Jan 2026

Manuel Galiñanes and Leo Klikers – TRANSCEND Media Service

7 Jan 2026 – The crisis surrounding Venezuela exposes a recurring illusion in international politics: the belief that defending international law requires choosing between opposing external coercion and opposing internal authoritarianism. This is a false dilemma. A principled position does not select which abuses to condemn. It rejects all exercises of unchecked power, whether they originate outside a country’s borders or are imposed upon its population from within. The tragedy of Venezuela is not only the brutality of an authoritarian regime, but the way a treaty-based international order systematically fails to protect the people caught between geopolitical maneuvering and domestic repression.

Venezuela’s authoritarian collapse is often framed as a confrontation between Washington and Caracas. This framing is misleading. The deeper problem lies in the structure of the international system itself. Built almost entirely on treaties among sovereign states, that system lacks the democratic foundations, executive authority, and judicial capacity required to enforce its own principles. It is an order that speaks the language of law while operating through paralysis, discretion, and selective enforcement. Venezuela is not an exception to this order; it is one of its most revealing symptoms.

There is no question that coercive external actions—military threats, extraterritorial sanctions, or attempts at regime change—violate core principles of international law, including sovereign equality and the prohibition on the use of force enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations [1]. Such actions undermine legality rather than defend it. Yet condemning these practices while remaining silent about the conduct of Nicolás Maduro’s government is not neutrality. It is a moral abdication. Sovereignty was never intended to function as a shield for repression. Under international law, states are bound by obligations toward their own populations, including respect for civil and political rights, democratic participation, and judicial independence. Venezuela has voluntarily accepted these obligations through multiple international treaties, and those obligations do not evaporate when a government invokes anti-imperialist rhetoric.

The factual record is unequivocal. United Nations bodies have documented systematic patterns of arbitrary detention, torture, extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, and the criminalization of political dissent in Venezuela [2]. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela has concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that crimes against humanity have been committed by state authorities [3]. International human rights organizations have corroborated these findings, describing a sustained dismantling of democratic institutions, manipulation of electoral processes, persecution of political opponents, and the forced displacement of millions [4, 5]. To ignore this reality while condemning external pressure does not advance peace or justice. It erases victims and empties human rights of their universal meaning.

The gravity of these violations has placed Venezuela within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. In 2021, the ICC Prosecutor opened a formal investigation into alleged crimes against humanity committed since 2017 [6]. This was a crucial acknowledgment that what is happening in Venezuela is not merely a political dispute, but a matter of international criminal law. Yet the limits of the Court are equally evident. Its jurisdiction depends on state consent, its enforcement powers are weak, and its effectiveness is routinely constrained by political pressure and non-cooperation. The ICC represents moral and legal progress, but it operates within an international system that ultimately allows governments—especially powerful ones—to decide when law applies and when it does not.

Many still look to the United Nations as the guardian of global legality. But the UN’s failure in Venezuela is not accidental or temporary. It is structural. The Organization is bound by a Charter that entrenches executive dominance, state sovereignty, and veto power at the very heart of enforcement. Nowhere is this failure more clearly codified than in Article 6 of the UN Charter, which states:

“A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council” [1].

This provision is a textbook example of institutional self-neutralization. Any serious application of Article 6 would require the Security Council to recommend the expulsion of some of its own permanent members—states that have repeatedly violated the Charter’s core principles. The result is permanent paralysis by design.

This paralysis is all the more indefensible because it rests on a broken promise. When the Charter was drafted in San Francisco in 1945, resistance to Article 6 was overcome by an explicit commitment to review and amend the provision after ten years, once experience revealed its shortcomings. That evaluation was due in 1954. It has never taken place. The so-called San Francisco Promise remains unfulfilled, while Article 6 stands as a lasting illustration of how treaty-based systems incapacitate themselves in the face of power.

The problem, therefore, is not unilateralism versus multilateralism. It is treaty-based governance itself. Treaties are negotiated, interpreted, and enforced by executives. They do not create genuine parliaments elected by citizens, democratic authorization of authority, or courts with the capacity to intervene directly when rights are violated. They rely on weak sanctions, voluntary compliance, and political bargaining. In such a system, autocrats exploit ambiguity, delay, and procedural complexity to entrench their rule. Deception and repression flourish precisely because the system lacks institutions capable of acting decisively in the name of peoples rather than governments.

This is not a Venezuelan problem. It is a systemic one. Politicians will always seek more power. That is a constant of political life. The decisive question is whether institutions are designed to restrain that power effectively. History shows that only two instruments can do so. The first is democratic federalization—structures that divide, balance, and legally bind authority across levels of government while grounding it in popular sovereignty. The second is a constitutional framework that requires those who aspire to political office to meet enforceable standards of competence, responsibility, and accountability.

A treaty-based world order possesses neither. It has no genuine global parliament elected by citizens, no executive authority capable of intervening to protect populations, and no judiciary with compulsory jurisdiction and effective enforcement power. As a result, peoples are exposed to a double vulnerability: repression by their own governments and instrumentalization by external powers that claim to act on their behalf.

From this perspective, Venezuela reveals the moral and institutional bankruptcy of the existing global order. The choice is not between opposing the United States or opposing Maduro. It is between accepting a system that tolerates both imperial overreach and domestic tyranny, or building one that subjects all political power to law.

The alternative is constitutional rather than utopian. A democratic world federation—grounded in a World Parliament elected by the world’s citizens, a binding system of world law, and an independent World Judiciary with compulsory jurisdiction over crimes against humanity—would reverse the logic of international politics [7, 8]. Under such a system, the Venezuelan people would be the primary subjects of international concern, not bargaining chips in a geopolitical struggle. Rights would be protected through lawful global institutions rather than through sanctions warfare or authoritarian impunity.

True international solidarity means standing with people, not regimes. It means defending Venezuelans imprisoned for dissent, journalists silenced, families forced into exile, and civil society dismantled. It also means rejecting the illusion that treaties among governments can substitute for democratic authority and enforceable law.

Venezuela is a warning. It shows what happens when an international system lacks the institutional courage to move beyond treaties toward constitutional governance. As long as global authority remains fragmented, executive-driven, and structurally unenforceable, injustice will persist and power will go unchecked. Only a democratic federal system—constitutional, enforceable, and grounded in popular sovereignty—can correct this foundational design failure.

References:

1. United Nations. 1945. Charter of the United Nations. San Francisco.
2. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2019. Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Geneva: United Nations.
3. United Nations Human Rights Council. 2020, 2022. Reports of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Geneva: United Nations.
4. Human Rights Watch. 2019. Venezuela’s Humanitarian Emergency: Large-Scale UN Response Needed. New York: Human Rights Watch.
5. Amnesty International. 2025. Venezuela: Enforced Disappearances Amount to Crimes Against Humanity. London: Amnesty International.
6. International Criminal Court. 2021. Situation in the Bolivarian Republico f Venezuela I. The Hague: ICC.
7. World Constitution and Parliament Association. Constitution for the Federation of Earth. Lakewood, CO: WCPA. http://worldparliament-gov.org/constitution
8. Galiñanes, Manuel, and Leo Klinkers. 2026. Constitution for a World Federation: A Worldwide Pact for Peace, Justice and Sustainability on Earth. In press.

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Manuel Galiñanes – Former president of the Federalist Alliance of European Federalists (FAEF)

Leo Klikers – President of FAEF

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 12 Jan 2026.

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