Nicaragua’s government has outlawed 1,500 non-governmental organisations, part of a longstanding crackdown on civil society groups viewed as hostile by President Daniel Ortega.

The move, published in the official government gazette on Monday, also involves the confiscation of assets belonging to the mostly religious groups by the state.

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The Nicaraguan Red Cross and several Catholic charities are among the NGOs shuttered to date, with many hit by charges dismissed as spurious.

Other targets include rotary and chess clubs, sports associations and groupings of small traders, rural people and pensioners, as well as Catholic radio stations and universities.

“They have not fulfilled their obligations,” according to the Interior Ministry resolution published in the gazette, which claimed the groups have failed to disclose a range of financial information including donations.

Ortega’s crackdown on civil society, as well as the Catholic Church, has intensified since anti-government protests erupted in 2018.

In total, authorities have shut down more than 5,000 civil society groups, private universities and media outlets.

Last week, the government also passed a regulation requiring NGOs to work exclusively in “partnership alliances” with state entities.

Moreover, last year, the government expelled more than 300 politicians, journalists, intellectuals and activists, accusing them of treason.

Al Jazeera has also been banned from Nicaragua and can only report from outside the country.

Reporting from Mexico on Monday, Al Jazeera’s John Holman said that due to the suppression of human rights, hundreds of thousands of people have fled to neighbouring countries like Costa Rica.

“It [the government crackdown] has sort of left a black hole in the country in terms of dissent,” he said. “With decisions like this [Monday’s NGO ban]… the situation is getting worse.”

Ortega became the leader of Nicaragua first as the head of a military government in 1979, after fighting as a guerrilla in the Sandinista movement that toppled the United States-backed Somoza family dictatorship.

He was later elected as the country’s president in 1985.

Beaten in elections in 1990, he returned to power in 2007 and has since quashed presidential term limits and seized control of all branches of the state.

While his regime is under US and European Union sanctions, within the country, human rights suppression continues.

Last month, a group of United Nations experts slammed “systematic and widespread abuses of international human rights law” in the Central American country.

In a statement last week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights also urged an end to rights abuses in Nicaragua.

The group said that the repression of rights “characterised by religious persecution, the continuation of arbitrary detentions and the serious conditions in which those in prison remain” should come to an end.