The decision that Venezuela’s top court will deliver on the disputed presidential election will be “final,” the body’s president Carylsia Rodriguez said Saturday at a hearing on the July 28 vote.

The court “continues the assessment that began on August 5, 2024, with a view to reaching the final decision… Its decisions are final and binding,” Rodriguez said.

Most observers say the Supreme Court is loyal to the government of Nicolas Maduro, which has claimed a narrow victory in the election.

Opposition leaders insist their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, won by a landslide, and have produced what they say are official tallies from polling stations as evidence.

Maduro himself summoned the Supreme Court on August 1 to “validate” a victory that opponents insist was fraudulent.

The court heard from all the candidates, including Maduro, this week — except for Gonzalez Urrutia, who has said he fears arrest.

He has not made any public appearances for more than a week, while main opposition leader Maria Corina Machado – a former presidential candidate who was banned from running this time – has said she is living in hiding.

The National Electoral Council (CNE) ratified Maduro’s victory on August 2, saying he had won 52 percent of the vote, but it refused to release exact data from election sites, saying the data had been hacked.

The opposition, however, published printed tallies — their legitimacy denied by Maduro — that they say show Gonzalez Urrutia won 67 percent of the vote.

The opposition and many observers say the alleged hacking of the results is a government invention to avoid having to publish election documents.

Maduro on Friday rejected those allegations, saying there had been “brutal” hacking, with “30 million attacks per minute on the electronic systems of the CNE and Venezuela.”

Opposition lawyer Perkins Rocha said that by turning to the Supreme Court, Maduro was effectively admitting that “no one believes” in the CNE, adding that “Maduro knows he can count on a (court) kneeling before him.”

The post-election protests have left 24 people dead, according to rights groups, and Maduro says 2,200 people have been arrested.

He has overseen a national collapse, including an 80 percent drop in the once-rich oil-rich country’s GDP, amid domestic economic mismanagement and international sanctions.