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News and Views from the Global South
COLOMBIA: Flunking Human Rights
Constanza Vieira
- The Colombian government has failed the human rights exam, and its allies, the right-wing paramilitary groups, have flunked out of international humanitarian law, as have the leftist guerrillas.
That is the conclusion reached by an alliance of the country’s leading social organisations, and contained in messages, both public and private, from the European Union (EU) and the United Nations. Most of the criticism is aimed at the right-wing government of President Alvaro Uribe.
In April, the government signed its agreement to a document produced by the Geneva-based U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR): ”Recommendations for Colombia 2003”.
The document outlines 27 recommendations that Colombia committed itself to living up to this year, 24 of which are based on international obligations assumed by the state in treaties it has signed on human rights and international humanitarian law.
”These are 27 of hundreds” of recommendations that have been set forth since the 1980s, Alirio Uribe, director of the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective and winner of the prestigious Martin Ennals award this year, told IPS.
The prize is awarded by the 10 most prominent international human rights organisations: Amnesty International, Defence for Children International, Diakonie Germany, Human Rights Watch, HURIDOCS, International Alert, International Commission of Jurists, International Federation of Human Rights, International Service for Human Rights, and the World Organisation Against Torture.
”There are entire books that compile the U.N. human rights recommendations to Colombia. Colombian governments, including the current one, have systematically failed to abide by them,” he said.
At the London Meeting on International Support for Colombia in July, the 15 EU member states, along with other potential donor nations and institutions, agreed to condition cooperation and aid to Colombia on the state’s compliance with the U.N. recommendations.
A Donor’s Coordination Conference of 10 countries was set up at the meeting, to monitor compliance.
But Colombia is the third biggest recipient of United States military aid after Israel and Egypt. Since 2000, Washington has used a ”national-interest waiver” to approve disbursements of aid to Colombia despite its failure to live up to the human rights conditions outlined by the U.S. Congress.
Colombia’s fiscal deficit is equivalent to 3.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), its public sector debt absorbs 55 percent of GDP, and military spending amounts to four percent of GDP according to official figures, and grew 38 percent over the past year.
But the Uribe administration has so far failed to secure international aid from the Donor’s Coordination Conference.
”We don’t need a coordination conference,” Nicola Bertolini, the European Commission representative in Colombia, said last week. ”The important thing is to see progress on human rights questions and the U.N. recommendations to Colombia.”
In this civil war-torn South American country of 44 million, 10 million people are unable to afford to cover their basic dietary needs, and 22 million survive on less than two dollars a day.
An average of 31,000 murders are committed annually, including 8,000 that are the direct consequence of the four-decade armed conflict, which has caused the forced displacement of two million people, according to official data, and three million according to independent sources.
Ahead of International Human Rights Day (Dec. 10), a fledgling alliance that links 150 local civil society groups carried out a detailed assessment of the Colombian state’s compliance with the U.N. human rights recommendations.
The alliance’s report says that of the 27 recommendations that the government agreed to with the UNHCHR, it has failed to show complete compliance with any of them, while it is partially abiding by seven.
However, in the case of 17 of the recommendations, there has been absolutely no effort to comply, and in fact ”actions are carried out that openly contradict” 10 of them, the report adds.
The alliance has brought together peace and civil resistance groups, peasant farmer associations, organisations of displaced persons, youth, women’s, human rights, indigenous and church groups, community organisations, environmentalists, trade unions and grassroots cooperatives.
Michael Frühling, director of the UNHCHR office in Colombia, presented his evaluation of the human rights situation on Dec. 1 in Brussels, to a panel which included Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos and representatives of European governments, the United Nations, and the Colombian alliance of social organisations.
The U.N. official said that ”less than we had hoped” had been achieved, and he called particular attention to the human rights violations committed by the paramilitaries and insurgents.
Four of the UNHCHR’s 27 recommendations are addressed to all of the parties to the conflict: the armed forces, the leftist rebels that have been fighting for 40 years, and the death squads that have been active since the mid-1970s, and which underwent a transformation into today’s right-wing paramilitary groups in the 1980s.
The alliance of social groups and Frühling agree that all of the armed actors involved in the conflict have violated the international standards that govern civil wars.
The UNHCHR recommendations to the state include putting an end to the ties between the death squads and sectors within the armed forces, and ensuring that the forces of law and order respect international humanitarian law.
In its April report, the UNHCHR noted that ”public officials implicated in serious abuses of power, failure to act or open collusion with paramilitaries” were responsible for ”grave, massive and systematic violations” of civil and political rights.
Those abuses included ”Extrajudicial executions (massacres as well as individual or selective killings), acts of torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, operations involving a disproportionate use of force, enforced disappearances, (and) illegal or arbitrary arrests.”
The report urges the Colombian government and Congress ”not to introduce any rules in the Colombian legal system that would enable members of the military forces to exercise judicial police or other functions incompatible with the independence of the justice system” – an allusion to a controversial anti-terrorism bill that is set for approval this week.
The UNHCHR also recommends that the government’s agenda for ”dialogue and negotiations” – which for now are only moving forward with the paramilitary groups – should include ”the issues of the right to truth, justice and reparation.”
In addition, the state should ”take disciplinary action against any state employees who through their actions or omissions in any way jeopardise the work of human rights defenders,” and should ”verify, quarterly, the accuracy and objectiveness of the data contained in military intelligence records concerning human rights defenders, and publish the results of (such) enquiries.”
According to the social alliance’s report, these are some of the areas in which the Colombian government has not only failed to live up to its commitments, but has carried out actions that ”openly contradict” them.
Frühling said advances may soon be seen in the decision to open intelligence records to civilian control, but the social alliance says such reports continue to be used to persecute human rights activists.
The alliance also states that ”many human rights defenders whose names appear in (intelligence) documents have been killed.”
In September, President Uribe, irritated by criticism from human rights activists, described them as ”mouthpieces for terrorism” and ”traffickers in human rights.”
”Not even the worst dictators in the world have pointed their finger at human rights defenders like the president did,” said Alirio Uribe (no relation), who added that the president’s verbal attack amounted to one of his most blatant failures to live up to the U.N. recommendations.
The activist said that since the president made his remarks, threats against human rights defenders have increased. ***** + UNHCHR-Colombia (http://www.hchr.org.co) + Recommendations (http://www.hchr.org.co/documentoseinformes/documentos/recomendaciones2003/d ocumentos.php3?cod=1&cat=50) (END/IPS/LA/HD-IP/TRA-SO SW/CV/MP/03)
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