Eduardo Torres is a human rights defender, lawyer and member of the Venezuelan Education-Action Program on Human Rights (Provea)’s legal enforcement team.
Eduardo Torres was forcibly disappeared on Friday, 9 May 2025 in the afternoon, likely due to his work as a human rights activist. Over four days, Eduardo’s family and Provea searched for him in different detention facilities where the police and/or military officials denied his detention.
On 13 May 2025, after a press conference organised by Provea, where the NGO demanded information from the Venezuelan State about the whereabouts of its lawyer, the Attorney General Tarek William Saab acknowledged on Instagram that Eduardo Torres was under the custody of the Venezuelan State. The prosecutor did not provide any information about the date, time, place, or security forces that carried out Eduardo Torres’ arrest. Nor did he report on the existence of any arrest warrant, much less on the prosecutor’s office that would be in charge of the investigation or the place of detention.
On 18 May 2025, the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) confirmed that Eduardo Torres is being held in the prison El Helicoide. He has not been able to meet with his relatives and able to meet with his relatives nor his lawyer to this day.
Eduardo Torres has repeatedly been the target of threats and harassment by police officials of the Venezuelan state. As a consequence, Eduardo Torres, like the rest of PROVEA’s team, is a beneficiary of precautionary protection measures granted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). It is the responsibility of the Venezuelan State to guarantee Eduardo’s life and integrity.
Eduardo Torres now joins a growing list of politically motivated arbitrary detentions of human rights defenders in Venezuela, which began with Javier Tarazona’s detention in July 2021, and continued with Rocio San Miguel in February 2024, Carlos Julio Rojas in April 2024, and Kennedy Tejeda in August 2024.
His disappearance and arbitrary detention is taking place in the context of an intensification of harassment and persecution by the Venezuelan State towards human rights defenders as an attempt by the Venezuelan government to silence the work of civil society in the aftermath of the elections of 28 July 2024.
Please take action on the right side of this page and send an email to the Permanent Missions of Venezuela to the United Nations in Geneva and New York calling on them to:
- Ensure Eduardo Torres’ rights to life, integrity, access to family members and to a fair trial are upheld
- Immediately and unconditionally release Eduardo Torres and every human rights defender unfairly detained in Venezuela.