BY TIM JOHNSON

 WASHINGTON -- Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader who wants to become Nicaragua's president again, was dealt a setback Thursday when an international human rights commission agreed to examine his stepdaughter's charges of sexual abuse.

 The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said it would determine if Zoilamérica Narváez was denied justice in her homeland of Nicaragua, where she has been unable to face her stepfather in a court of law.

 Ortega, who led the 1979 Sandinista revolution and governed Nicaragua throughout the 1980s, is in a tight race for the presidency in Nov. 4 elections.

 The Chilean president of the rights commission, Claudio Grossman, denied that the panel was interfering in Nicaragua's domestic politics by announcing in the run-up to the vote that it would hear the Narváez case.

 ``There's never a good moment to do any of this,'' he said, noting that the commission would have been criticized had it waited until after the elections to announce it
 would make a determination in the case.

 Narváez, who is the daughter of Ortega's wife, writer Rosario Murillo, asserted in 1998 that Ortega began sexually abusing her when she was 11 years old, and continued doing so for more than a decade.

 The charges sparked a firestorm in Nicaragua, touching on issues of incest, rape and women's rights, and created some dissension in the Sandinista party, which Ortega overcame by purging the dissidents. Ortega, though denying the charges of abuse, has shielded himself from prosecution because he enjoys parliamentary immunity as a member of congress. Over the past three years, fellow legislators refused to strip Ortega of his immunity, which would have forced him to face his accuser.

 Narváez raised the abuse charges anew in a statement this week opposing Ortega's presidential candidacy, saying her stepfather ``sexually abused and harassed me for 19 years.''

 The commission, which was formally established in 1960, falls under the umbrella of the Organization of American States, representing 34 hemispheric nations.

 The commission will need one or two years to collect evidence and determine if Nicaragua denied Narvaéz justice in its courts. If Nicaragua is found responsible, the
 commission may levy a punitive fine.

 This is one of 23 individual cases the commission agreed Thursday to investigate to determine state responsibility in the denial of justice.

 While opponents of Ortega applauded the decision, others saw it as part of a U.S. campaign to avert an Ortega electoral triumph. Last week the United States warned that it would look unfavorably on an Ortega government.

 Katherine Hoyt of the Nicaragua Network, a pro-Sandinista solidarity group based in Washington, said network affiliates have been torn by the Narváez allegations.

 ``Daniel Ortega only denies it to the foreign press. He does not deny it to the Nicaraguan press,'' she said.

 Even so, she added that her organization is unhappy with recent State Department warnings of a possible Ortega victory.

 ``They've been interfering in Nicaragua to an unacceptable degree,'' she said of U.S. government officials.

                                   © 2001