Nearly 7,000 people have been killed during security operations in Venezuela in the past year and a half, the UN said Thursday, warning that many of the killings likely constituted "executions".
In a fresh report, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said the Venezuelan government had registered at least 6,856 killed in alleged confrontations with state forces since the beginning of 2018.
"The incidence of alleged extrajudicial killings by security forces... has been shockingly high," Bachelet's office said in a statement.
Last year, the government registered 5,287 killings, purportedly for "resistance to authority" during such operations, between January 1 and May 19 this year, another 1,569 similar killings were registered, according to the report.
The numbers were provided by the Venezuelan government to the UN rights office in response to a request made following a visit to the country by a technical team in March, spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told AFP, adding that this was the first time the UN had published the figures.
The UN rights chief, who herself visited Venezuela last month, warned in her report that "there are reasonable grounds to believe that many of these killings constitute extrajudicial executions committed by the security forces."
"These killings warrant immediate investigation to ensure accountability of perpetrators and guarantees of non-recurrence," the report said, urging Caracas to "dissolve FAES."
And Bachelet called on the government to "establish an impartial and independent national mechanism, with the support of the international community, to investigate extrajudicial executions during security operations, ensure accountability of perpetrators and redress for victims."
The report concluded that "there are reasonable grounds to believe that grave violations of economic and social rights, including the rights to food and health, have been committed in Venezuela."
It also said that "as the economic crisis deepened, the authorities began using social programmes in a discriminatory manner, based on political grounds, and as an instrument of social control."
The report meanwhile found that sanctions imposed on Venezuela, while not responsible for the country's woes, were "exacerbating further the effects of the economic crisis, and thus the humanitarian situation."
Thursday's report charged that Venezuela's government over the past decade, and especially since 2016, had implemented a strategy "aimed at neutralising, repressing and criminalising political opponents and people critical of the government."
In the statement, the rights office pointed to a series of laws, policies and practices in Venezuela that it said had "restricted the democratic space, dismantled institutional checks and balances, and allowed patterns of grave violations."