An international panel of legal experts has concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe that El Salvador's government committed crimes against humanity under a state of emergency that has been in force since March 2022, drawing an irate response from President Nayib Bukele, who blamed a coordinated campaign by George Soros-funded organisations.

"It is amusing to see all the NGOs, think tanks, media outlets, and paid journalists of Soros attacking in unison and in such an obviously coordinated way," Bukele wrote on X on March 11, without elaborating further. "I would be worried if it were not so. It means we are on the right path. Thank God," he added.

The five-member International Group of Experts for the Investigation of Human Rights Violations in the Framework of the State of Emergency in El Salvador (GIPES), established in 2024 at the initiative of the Due Process of Law Foundation and backed by organisations including the International Federation for Human Rights and the International Commission of Jurists, said Bukele's administration had weaponised emergency powers to concentrate authority while carrying out mass arbitrary detentions, torture, enforced disappearances and killings against the civilian population. The report was presented on March 10 during sessions of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The panel's conclusion – that there is a "reasonable basis to believe" crimes against humanity have occurred – mirrors the evidentiary threshold the International Criminal Court's Office of the Prosecutor applies when deciding whether to open a formal investigation.

The report lands at a moment of acute regional significance. Costa Rica, long regarded as Central America's most stable democracy, announced last year plans to build a mega-prison modelled on El Salvador's controversial Cecot facility, a $35mn project designed to house 5,100 inmates. Leaders such as Argentine President Javier Milei, Ecuador's Daniel Noboa and Chile's newly elected José Antonio Kast have also openly praised Bukele's iron-fist approach to gang violence, an allure that may now be tested by the crimes against humanity finding.

More than 90,000 people have been detained since the emergency was declared, many without arrest warrants or individualised evidence linking them to gang activity. Bukele has acknowledged that around 8,000 detainees were subsequently released for lack of evidence. Civil society organisations documented 403 deaths in custody by August 2025, including four children, and 540 cases of enforced disappearance as of February 2025.

Between 1,194 and 3,319 minors were detained by 2024 under legal reforms permitting sentences of up to 20 years for children aged 16 and up to 10 years for those aged between 12 and 16. Documented abuses included beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, forced nudity and denial of food, water and medical care.

Salvadoran officials rejected the findings outright. Vice Foreign Minister Adriana Mira said the government does not engage in forced disappearances or related violations, while Public Defender General René Escobar stated that the country rejects any policy involving torture, sexual violence or arbitrary executions.

While acknowledging that homicide rates have fallen more than 90% from previous peaks, placing El Salvador among the least violent countries in the Western Hemisphere by government statistics, GIPES argued the decline had been secured through mass human rights violations incompatible with El Salvador's international obligations. The Cecot megaprison has also become an instrument of US immigration policy under President Donald Trump, whose ideologically aligned administration last year paid to detain more than 250 Venezuelan migrants there under disputed legal authority.

A separate report presented on March 5 by the Salvadoran humanitarian organisation Cristosal identified at least 86 people currently held as political prisoners, the first such detentions since the 1992 peace accords ended the country's civil war.

The GIPES report traces democratic backsliding to May 2021, when the ruling-party-controlled Legislative Assembly dismissed the magistrates of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court and the Attorney General of the Republic. A subsequent legal reform forced the early retirement of more than 200 judges. A constitutional amendment enacted in 2025 removed presidential term limits entirely, consolidating what GIPES described as a model of personalised, unchecked executive power. The legislature, which remains dominated by Bukele's New Ideas party, can extend the emergency decree and has done so more than 47 times without substantive debate.

Restrictions on civic space have deepened in parallel. Legislation passed in May 2025 requires organisations and individuals receiving international funding to register as "foreign agents" and pay a 30% tax, with penalties including excessive fines, cancellation of legal status and imprisonment, provisions GIPES compared to similar laws in Russia, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

GIPES called on the UN Human Rights Council to consider establishing an international investigative mechanism to collect and preserve evidence for future criminal proceedings, and urged the international community to apply targeted sanctions against those responsible. It also recommended the creation of an independent case-review commission for detainees and the restoration of judicial independence.