Updates from WOLA tagged “Special Jurisdiction for Peace”

Blog entries, commentaries, and statements from WOLA’s Colombia team

Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace Must Open a Macro Case on Sexual Violence

March 18, 2022

On March 17, WOLA and nine other national and international civil society organizations published a statement calling on the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP)—the 2016 peace accord’s transitional justice tribunal—to open a macro case to investigate sexual violence in the context of Colombia’s internal armed conflict.

According to the organizations, Colombia has an international obligation to act with due diligence to prevent, investigate, and prosecute sexual violence perpetrated by both state and non-state armed actors and to provide reparations to victims. The obligation to document, investigate, and prosecute these crimes, particularly against women and LGBT+ persons, and to adopt a gender-sensitive analysis of major international crimes has taken root and become increasingly ingrained in the culture of international justice.

The peace accord and the norms that regulate the functioning of the JEP incorporate a gender-based focus that see sexual violence as an autonomous crime with no concessions. These obligations, together with the principle of centering victims, commit the JEP to prioritize the rights of all victims of sexual violence. The opening of a national macro case would make visible, in an autonomous and specialized manner, the way in which discrimination affects rights to sexual liberty, integrity, and autonomy of the victims. A macro case is essential to materialize the approach of centralizing victims, which should guide the actions of the JEP.

Given the historical and very high level of impunity for these crimes, along with the low level of acknowledgment by those responsible, the JEP has a responsibility to generate conditions to overcome these barriers and guarantee their rights to truth, justice, and reparation. Civil society and victims have insisted that this is an urgent measure for the satisfaction of victims’ rights, as opening the macro case would improve their situation. The peace accord and the laws that develop it gave the JEP instruments to investigate sexual violence.

Read the full Spanish statement here.
Read the unofficial English translation here.

Tags: Gender Perspective, LGBT+, Sexual Violence, Special Jurisdiction for Peace, Transitional Justice

Power Rivalries Put Pressure on Colombia’s Peace Treaty

March 15, 2021

By: Mariano Aguirre, WOLA Board Member
(Cross-posted from chathamhouse.org)
(Versión en español disponible en esglobal.org)

The creation of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP in Spanish) as part of the 2016 Peace Treaty between the Colombian State and the guerrilla group FARC has seen its work much criticized over claims from certain powerful factions that it has a hidden agenda to free former FARC leaders and imprison senior military commanders.

Investigations carried out by the JEP have been a major success of the peace agreement and the process that followed. But most of the right-wing section of governing party Centro Democrático have been working to cut its funding and complicate the implementation of the peace deal.

Founded on the principle of transitional justice, the JEP works by recognizing accountability for past crimes from the conflict and establishing alternative sentences. This does mean some powerful people – politicians, businesspeople, and landowners – may feel threatened because its investigations may reveal their past connections to both official and nonofficial repression unleashed upon trade unionists, peasants, politicians, and civilians in the name of defeating the FARC.

Ariel Avila, from the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, states that as transitional justice moves forward ‘victims will be more at risk. As ex guerrilla members, military officers, parapoliticians, begin to tell the truth, they will inform on those who supported them, those who benefitted from the war, people who, for the most part, are within the scope of legality’.

Hostages and human rights violations

The JEP recently accused seven FARC leaders for promoting kidnapping as a systematic practice and inflicting human rights violations on hostages, and also announced it will investigate and prosecute state security forces for war crimes, as the Colombian army stands accused of allegedly murdering at least 6,402 innocent civilians under what is called ‘false positives’ – counting them as guerrilla fighters to give the impression they were winning the war against the FARC.

Almost 80 per cent of those crimes were committed between 2002 and 2008 when right-wing political leader Álvaro Uribe was president and, since the JEPs’ creation in 2017, he and some of his followers – known as ‘Uribismo’ – along with Iván Duque’s current government have been persistently critical of the body.

This has led the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) to express concern about ‘persisting public statements questioning the suitability of the JEP and their staff, and about the legislative proposals to abolish the Special Jurisdiction for Peace’, and the damage being done to the JEP was revealed in a detailed report from 14 senators of different opposition parties in the Colombian Congress, led by Senator Juanita Goebertus (Green Alliance Party). 

The main targets of the attacks by the government and Uribistas are the reforms in the rural sector, voluntary coca crop eradication, and the implementation of transitional justice, which the peace treaty committed the government to achieve. Returning land to thousands of peasants displaced by violence would reverse gross inequalities in land distribution, as would the political strengthening of local communities.

“The main targets of the attacks by the government and Uribistas are the reforms in the rural sector, voluntary coca crop eradication, and the implementation of transitional justice.”

But rural elites strongly oppose these moves and the state has been largely absent in these rural areas, contributing to a rise in illegal mining, illicit crops, and now the killings of social leaders and ex-FARC guerrilla combatants. The president of the JEP recently claimed ‘a social leader is killed every 41 hours’ and, according to a report by the Colombian Commission of Jurists along with other local groups, these killings are being committed by hit men, FARC dissidents, organized crime, and even members of the armed forces.

Most cases are not being solved and the Inter American Commission for Human Rights indicates most government investigations focus on the material authors of the crime, not those who gave the order. Human Rights Watch says that, because of such state shortcomings, investigations and prosecutions are facing significant hurdles particularly with regard to the ‘intellectual authors’ of many killings.

Rural communities under pressure from criminals

OHCHR estimates 513 human rights defenders and 248 former FARC combatants were killed between 2016 and the end of 2020 but this is disputed by the government. Many of those who died had accepted the peace agreement, committing themselves and their communities to stop harvesting coca in exchange for receiving state financial assistance and shifting to producing legal goods. But Duque’s government, believing alternative crops do not work, froze the scheme alleging a lack of funds.

This put communities under renewed pressure from organized crime and guerrillas to produce coca again, an option made easier by the ban on the coca fumigations which were used by the US government between 1994 and 2015 to keep crop levels down and reduce drug production.

Fumigations were ended in 2015 by the Colombian Supreme Court due to evidence that the crop spraying harmed the environment as well as human and animal health, but the risk of cuts to aid and loans from the Donald Trump US administration recently pushed Duque to try and lift these restrictions.

His government has launched military-civil stabilization operations in areas of high conflict and illicit crop production, but peasants and indigenous communities see fumigation as another breach of the peace treaty and they intend to resist it.

They also consider stabilization to be too dependent on the military, and various experts also consider this approach to be inefficient and a poor substitute for the lack of a proper state presence in rural Colombia.

“Peasants and indigenous communities see fumigation as another breach of the peace treaty and they intend to resist it.”

Now with the change of administration in the US, Joe Biden has already expressed interest in the protection of human rights and appears less likely to be supportive of restarting fumigation as well as any ongoing resistance of the Colombian government to the peace agreement, especially as key Democrats in the Obama administration and Congress supported the negotiation and approval of the peace deal and many are now in the Biden administration.

The trick for Duque now – and Uribe – is to successfully balance their own partisan policy preferences with the country’s need for long-term military, strategic, and economic ties to Washington.

Tags: False Positives, FARC, Illicit Crop Eradication, Indigenous Communities, JEP, Military and Human Rights, Politics of Peace, Special Jurisdiction for Peace, Transitional Justice

International Civil Society Organizations Welcome the Progress of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and Support the Legitimate Work of Human Rights Organizations and Victims of Extrajudicial Executions

February 28, 2021

On February 24, over 25 international civil society organizations, including WOLA—through the Cooperation Space for Peace (Espacio de Cooperación para la Paz—published a statement commending the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP) for its February 18 order on how it plans to investigate and prosecute the at least 6,402 extrajudicial executions it has identified in macro-case 03.

The original Spanish-language statement is here.
The English-language version of the statement is below.

The undersigned international civil society organizations welcome the progress made by the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP). On February 18, 2021, through Auto 033 of 2021, the JEP made public its prioritization strategy within Case 03, known as “false positive” extrajudicial executions. According to information gathered by the Chamber for the Acknowledgment of Truth and Responsibility (Sala de Reconocimiento de Verdad y Responsabilidad), “at least 6,402 people were illegitimately killed to be presented as combat casualties throughout the national territory between 2002 and 2008”.

The courageous and rigorous work of Colombian human rights and victims’ organizations has been key in clarifying the truth about these painful events, which the Colombian people continue to mourn and must be prosecuted. Seeking to reduce the JEP’s work as an attempt to “discredit” the leader of the Democratic Center (Centro Democrático) political party, not only constitutes an affront, but it is also untrue and puts at serious risk, once again, the lives and work of human rights defenders, whose truth is key to definitively overcoming the conflict in Colombia. 

We reject this new stigmatization and alert the state and the Government of Colombia about the serious security consequences it may have on the victims and defenders who have been denouncing these cases for years.

It is important that the JEP does not falter in its work, which, as stated by the spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Liz Throssel, “is taking important steps in the fight against impunity, which will help Colombia to address past serious violations of international law and prevent the recurrence of such violations”. 

As international civil society organizations that have accompanied Colombian human rights organizations for many years, we reiterate our support for their legitimate work, which we consider essential for consolidating peace and strengthening the rule of law in Colombia.

All sectors and actors should refrain from issuing stigmatizing statements that put lives at risk and further polarize Colombia. We encourage all to contribute with determination from their different roles and mandates to the definitive overcoming of the conflict in Colombia.

Tags: False Positives, Politics of Peace, Special Jurisdiction for Peace

UN Security Council Must Guarantee that Colombia Implement Peace and Protect Social Leaders

December 8, 2020

On November 24, 2020—four years after the signing of the 2016 peace accord between the Colombian State and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)—Defend the Peace Colombia (Defendamos la Paz Colombia, DLP) published a statement addressed to Ambassadors before the United Nations Security Council. DLP, a broad coalition comprised of many sectors of Colombian civil society and of which WOLA forms part, urged the Security Council to demand a greater commitment to peace accord implementation from the Colombian government.

DLP’s statement expressed deep concern with ongoing threats against the physical and legal security of FARC ex-combatants, the assassinations of social leaders, and a disturbing trend of massacres. Rather than taking the measures in the accord to prevent and condemn violence in the territories, the government uses the violence as an excuse to deepen its campaign to discredit the peace process. The coalition also noted that in international mediums like the Security Council, the government maintains a pro-peace discourse while simultaneously engaging in an anti-peace discourse domestically.

The window of opportunity for peace remains open. DLP trusts in the Security Council’s cooperation to use existing mechanisms to verify and defend human rights throughout this path to peace and to demand the Colombian government hold to its commitments.

A translation of the full statement is below.
The original Spanish version is here.

Dear Ambassadors,

We address you as Defend the Peace, Colombia’s peace movement, to denounce the threats against the physical and legal security of ex-combatants of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), as well as the assassinations of social leaders in the territories.

1. Physical safety at risk

The latest report of the United Nations Verification Mission, presented to the Security Council in September 2020, says: “since the signing of the peace accord, the Mission has verified 297 attacks against former members of the FARC-EP, including 224 murders (of which 4 were women), 20 disappearances, and 53 attempted murders (of which 4 were women)”. From October to November, the FARC-EP reported 18 additional murders.

So far in 2020, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia received information on 110 cases concerning killings of human rights defenders, of which 51 have been confirmed and the others are under verification. As of October 31, of the 61 massacres reported this year, 51 were documented with 195 deaths.

The United Nations Verification Mission is in charge of verifying point 3.4 of the accord, which outlines the security guarantees for ex-combatants, human rights defenders, social and political movements. It also addresses the struggle against successor paramilitary organizations and includes unfulfilled government commitments.

The National Commission for Security Guarantees, created by the accord, is meant to formulate public policy on security and crime in order to protect the people involved in the implementation of the accord. To date, this body has yet to formulate this public policy. For two years, the President, who presides over the Commission, only attended three meetings; the Special Jurisdiction for Peace was forced to take action and enforce precautionary measures for ex-combatants and summon the meeting.

Not only has the government failed to take the measures in the accord to prevent and condemn violence in the territories, the government also uses the violence as an excuse to deepen its campaign to discredit the peace process, insisting that the causes of violence lie with the accord. On the contrary, the peace accord provides the elements necessary to stop the violence, of which the government continues to turn its back on.

It is important to note that a significant number of assassinations and massacres mainly take place where the Armed Forces have deployed the most troops.

In the 1980s, Colombia experienced the extermination of a political party with the murders of more than 2,500 members of the Patriotic Union. The defenders of peace ask the Security Council to help avoid repeating history. 

2. Legal security at risk

Colombia’s transitional justice system—the Comprehensive System of Justice, Truth, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-Repetition—is under attack by President Duque, his government and the ruling party.

In open interference with the independence of the judicial branch, President Duque has dictated orders to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.

Several paramilitary commanders have expressed a willingness to submit to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. The President told the judges that “in that justice system [the transitional justice system] there is no room for members of paramilitary groups, as they can submit to the ordinary justice system under other normative frameworks “.

The Colombian government demands the truth from the FARC-EP. But it also outright rejects the truth when it is told. Members of the FARC-EP not only confessed their responsibility in the murder of conservative leader Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, but also pledged to deliver evidence during pertinent procedural hearings.

The President dismissed this act, asserted that the country is still waiting to know the real perpetrators and causes, demanded that the JEP make a prompt determination of the veracity of the claims, and suggested the JEP undertake an investigation for false self-incrimination. The President insists that “it was the murderous bullets of drug trafficking,” and not the FARC-EP that killed Gómez Hurtado, in attempts to delegitimize the JEP.

The governing party presented a project to reform the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, announced a popular referendum to repeal it, and proposed changing the composition of the Truth Commission. President Duque filed objections to the statutory law of the JEP, which failed in Congress and ultimately delayed the start of processes for months.

The onslaught of the government and its party against transitional justice and against the peace accord does not stop.

As such, Defend the Peace brings to the Security Council’s attention the Colombian government’s responsibility, by omission, of attacks and assassination attempts against those building peace. We also bring to its attention the opposition against the transitional justice system—the backbone of the peace accord—by the President, his representatives, and his political party. We note that in international mediums like the Security Council, the government maintains a pro-peace discourse. In Colombia, the government maintains an anti-peace discourse.

We’ve seen how several post-conflict contexts make the transition from Chapter VI to Chapter VII when one or more parties do not comply with what was agreed upon. It is our conviction that, if effective and immediate measures are not taken to prevent killings and massacres as well as guarantees aren’t made for the legal security of ex-combatants, the international commitments assumed by the Colombian state could end up turning the Colombian case into an “international threat to peace and security,” in the terms developed by the Security Council’s practice in the last decade.

Defend the Peace, a platform that integrates a broad coalition comprised of diverse and representative sectors of Colombian society, brings together the peace accord negotiators from the government and the FARC-EP, social leaders and human rights defenders, victims’ and women’s organizations, Indigenous and Afro-descendants, ex-ministers and congressmen, unions, businessmen, and intellectuals.

We respectfully request that you demand from the Government of Colombia a greater commitment to the peace accord, its implementation, its signatories, and the new generation of Colombians. Our window of opportunity for peace remains open; we trust in the cooperation of the Security Council not to close it.

We are united by the desire for peace and we know that we have mechanisms from the United Nations to verify and defend human rights and to accompany us in this path to peace.

Tags: Civil Society Peace Movement, FARC, massacres, Social Leaders, Special Jurisdiction for Peace, United Nations

LGBT+ Groups Provide Evidence to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace About Prejudice-Based Abuses Committed Against Them During Colombia’s Armed Conflict

September 30, 2020
(Photo from the Special Jurisdiction for Peace)

On September 15, Caribe Afrimativo presented to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jursidicción Especial para la Paz, JEP) a report detailing how the Colombian armed conflict’s violence targeted lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT+) people. Submitted by the organizations Casa Diversa Comuna 8 in Medellín and the Crisálida Collective in San Rafael, with the support of Lawyers Without Borders Canada and Global Affairs Canada, this historic report establishes that conflict-related violence by state forces and paramilitary groups targeted LGBT+ groups. 

Titled What We Lost (Lo que perdimos), the report submitted to the tribunal demonstrates how members of LGBT+ groups were targeted on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression. The acts of prejudice-based violence identified in the report’s private testimonies establish how systematic attacks against LGBT+ groups were committed to achieve territorial and social control during the conflict. State forces and paramilitary groups threatened, humiliated, arbitrarily detained, forcibly displaced, sexually abused, and assassinated members of the groups in attempts to achieve military advantage in the conflict. Through either direct participation in the grave abuses or tacit complicity in cases committed by paramilitary groups, state forces played a decisive role in this persecution – a crime against humanity.

Private testimonies recount how LGBT+ community members resorted to travelling in groups to protect themselves from constant abuses. In Comuna 8, testimonies uncover how three social leaders from Casa Diversa were forcibly displaced, causing many other members to abandon the group and the area in fear of their lives. Other abuses at the hands of the Cacique Nutibara bloc of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC), in collusion with the Army’s Fourth Brigade, occurred between 1997 and 2008. In San Rafael, the Metro Bloc of the AUC assassinated the Crisálida Collective’s leader and acted in collusion with state forces between 1997 and 2001. Collected with the help of Caribe Afirmativo since 2018, the testimonies will help the JEP hold perpetrators accountable.

Caribe Afirmativo continues to work to amplify the voices of victims and their communities in Colombia’s transitional justice system. The organization presented a report to the Truth Commission, along with numerous technical documents that record the experiences of LGBT+ victims in Colombia’s armed conflict. Previous reports submitted by Caribe Afirmativo to the JEP focus on conflict-related violence against LGBT+ people. However, the testimonies in this latest report are unique because they provide evidence on how state forces and paramilitary groups targeted the leaders of locally based LGBT+ groups, who promote fundamental rights, democratic ideals, and peace, to permanently exterminate their presence in civil society. Therefore, this is the first report submitted to the JEP that reveals how LGBT+ groups, not only LGBT+ individuals, were subject to conflict-related violence.

The transitional justice system provides a key pathway for victims to seek truth, justice, and establish memory. It allows victims to get back what was taken from them: visibility, full exercise of their rights, and peace. As indicated by JEP Judge Reinere Jaramillo, the report “activates memory in a country where violence still persists.” Colombia remains one of the most dangerous countries in Latin America for the LGBT+ community, despite progressive legislation and visibility. According to Colombia’s Ombudsman Office, just in 2020 thus far, over 60 LGBT+ persons have been killed. With this alarming statistic in mind, it is crucial to support the efforts of organizations and mechanisms working to understand the legacies of the past to ensure Colombia’s LGBT+ community is able to live in peace in a post-conflict setting.

A Spanish-language executive summary of the Lo que perdimos report is available here.

Tags: LGBT+, Special Jurisdiction for Peace