Marilena Stegbauer is a 2023 McCain Global Leader from Germany and an international lawyer based in London. She is part of the legal team advocating for the release of Jesús Armas.
On December 10, 2024, my friend and fellow McCain Global Leader, Jesús Armas, was forcibly disappeared by masked men in Caracas. Today, eight months on, he remains arbitrarily detained. Overnight, he was cut off from his partner and elderly parents, denied a fair trial, and held incommunicado, in one of Venezuela’s most notorious torture centers.
I still remember where I was when I saw the WhatsApp message. A numb feeling followed the words I had just read, as if I was trying to rearrange them in my head to make them less cruel. But the truth was immediate and sharp: Jesús had been taken. He could be anywhere. Since then, Jesús has remained detained by the Venezuelan state—without charges, without a fair trial, and without the dignity of seeing or speaking to those who love him.
In February 2025, I joined forces with Defiende Venezuela, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, and the McCain Institute to submit an urgent petition to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), following a similar petition before the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), which has since taken precedence over Jesús’s case within the UN human rights system. While sifting through layers of obfuscation and silence to piece together the facts of Jesús’s disappearance and detention for the legal drafting, I held on to the hope that raising his case in the international arena could make the difference, we need to get him released and reunited with his loved ones.
I kept thinking about Jesús’s quiet strength, his clarity of purpose, and the way he refused to let Venezuela’s decay normalize injustice against the people. Despite being aware of the high risks, Jesús’s commitment to a free Venezuela never wavered. That same clarity now drives us to demand that the WGEID recognizes his disappearance before the UN Human Rights Council and works closely with the WGAD to declare his detention as not only arbitrary, but emblematic of a broader pattern of state-sponsored repression in Venezuela.
We argued that Jesús’s detention violates every foundational principle of international law:
- There was no legal basis for his arrest: He was abducted without a warrant and held in complete isolation—no official record, no legal charges, no family contact.
- He is being punished for his ideas: His advocacy for democracy and transparency and his work with the opposition in the July 2024 elections made him a target. His detention is not about law enforcement. It’s about fear of freedom of expression.
- He has had no fair trial: He was denied access to his lawyer, denied access to his own case file, making his defence impossible. Every safeguard was stripped away.
- He is being discriminated against based on political opinion: Jesús is spearheading a new generation of Venezuelans demanding democracy. His case isn’t random, it’s methodical repression.
We’ve asked the WGAD to issue an urgent appeal and to coordinate with the UN Special Rapporteurs on torture, freedom of expression, and arbitrary detention. Jesús’s situation isn’t just an isolated incident and a personal tragedy—it’s a pattern of abduction and violence that occurs nearly every day in Venezuela, and even against foreign citizens, including Americans (see for example, the case of Lucas Hunter, released on 19 July after being designated wrongfully detained by the US government) and must be recognised as such.
As I worked on the submission, I often asked myself: How would Jesús respond to all of this if the roles were reversed? I think he’d do exactly what we are doing—lean on his existing network and built even stronger alliance. You may detain an individual, but you cannot detain a community determined to bring Jesús home. To mark Jesús’s six months detention in June, the McCain Institute joined forces with the Obama Foundation, calling for his immediate release in what was a first and yet only one example of the extraordinary international solidarity growing around his case serving as a the stark reminder that silence is not an option.
What you need to know about Jesús is that he is not the loud, performative kind of leader, but the quite courageous one. The one who keeps showing up—for his city, for his principles, for people he might never meet. That’s what he did when he ran for office in Caracas. That’s what he did as a McCain Global Leader and Obama Foundation scholar and what he would do right now as a recently admitted student to the University of Stanford’s prestigious Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy (MIP) programme. He would continue to advocate for civil liberties, for access to water and energy for the economically deprived, for public services free from corruption and for the release of those who walked before him.
The night before his abduction, he organized a vigil for political prisoners. That night, Jesús lit a light.
Now it’s our turn to carry that light forward—for him and in full display for the world to see.