Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

COLOMBIA: Civil Society Takes Aim Against ‘Impunity Law’

Constanza Vieira

BOGOTA, Jun 27 2005 (IPS) - The Colombia office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) offered advice and support to victims of paramilitary groups who plan to take legal action against a new law that will govern the demobilisation of these extreme right-wing militias.

The "law on justice and peace" approved on Jun. 21 by the Colombian Congress creates a legal framework for the disarmament of the paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), which is involved in closed-door negotiations with the government of President Alvaro Uribe.

According to leading human rights watchdogs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the new law will grant impunity to paramilitary combatants guilty of gross human rights abuses, by providing for reduced sentences.

The director of the local UNHCHR office, Michael Frühling, argued last Friday that the human rights crimes must be clarified, and said "the victims need the full support of the state" if the law laying the groundwork for the disarmament of the paramilitaries is to be effective.

That means "working so that all of the victims and organisations start preparing their lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the law," human rights lawyer Eduardo Carreño, with the José Alvear Restrepo lawyers collective, told IPS.

As a group, the victims will also challenge the law before the Constitutional Court.

Since November 2003, some 5,000 paramilitary fighters have laid down their arms as a result of the negotiations with the right-wing Uribe administration, which began a year ago.

Although the paramilitaries were outlawed in 1989, their ties to the military have been amply documented by organisations like Human Rights Watch.

Both the armed forces and the paramilitary militias combat the leftist guerrillas, which have been fighting for over 40 years.

The paramilitary groups are blamed by the United Nations and human rights organisations for the lion’s share of the atrocities like massacres, forced disappearances, and cases of torture and forced displacement, committed in the armed conflict.

When the new law to govern the demobilisation goes into effect, 20 prosecutors will have just 60 days to carry out "in-depth" investigations into the human rights abuses and other crimes committed by the more than 10,000 paramilitaries expected to lay down their arms by December, the deadline agreed in the negotiations with the government.

In a Jun. 15 press release, Human Rights Watch said "The bill drastically limits time frames for investigation of paramilitaries’ crimes, thus making it nearly impossible to hold paramilitaries accountable for them.

"Even if convicted, paramilitary commanders could get away with serving as little as two years for all their crimes, without having to confess, fully disclose their knowledge of the criminal networks they run, or even turn over all their massive illegally acquired wealth."

The Movement of Victims of Crimes of State (MVCE) was created Saturday in Bogotá, after a three-day conference opened by Frühling last Thursday.

The more than 800 Colombians taking part in the conference included relatives of victims of murder or forced disappearance, torture survivors, victims of rape and forced displacement, and survivors of "ethnocide" and the extermination of leftist political groupings like the Patriotic Union and the Communist Party.

Carreño said the MVCE will file complaints over human rights crimes before institutions of international justice like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the committee for the International Pact on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Criminal Court (in the case of crimes committed after its creation on Jul. 1, 2002).

Thus, "the way will begin to be paved to achieve justice, establish the truth about what happened, make reparations effective, and above all, ensure that these crimes are not repeated," said the human rights lawyer.

The MVCE declared Sergio Caramagna, the head of the Organisation of American States (OAS) mission set up to monitor the negotiations for the disarmament of the paramilitary groups, persona non grata, and requested that he leave the country, on the argument that he has failed to fulfil his mandate.

Last Friday, Caramagna lashed out at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, after it urged the governments of the Netherlands and Sweden to stop providing financial support to the OAS mission. The rights group argued that the mission’s presence had merely helped legitimise the impunity surrounding the paramilitary demobilisation process.

The Argentine diplomat, who was also the target of harsh criticism when he headed a similar mission in the early 1990s, overseeing the demobilisation of the U.S.-financed "contra" fighters in Nicaragua, said it made no sense to demand results from the verification mission while simultaneously urging donors to cut off their funding.

Caramagna stressed that his work in Colombia continued to enjoy the support of the OAS member countries, "which forms the basis of our task here."

The new "law on justice and peace" would also apply to the eventual demobilisation of leftist insurgents.

The main rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), controls a large part of rural Colombia, and is the target of Plan Patriot, a U.S.-financed and advised military offensive.

Uribe claimed the law was not negotiated with the AUC chiefs, several of whom are said to be druglords.

"This has all been done in good faith, with integrity and open discussions," said the president, a landowner who in the 1990s served as governor of the northern province of Antioquia, where the paramilitary groups are strong.

But Ombudsman Volmar Pérez complained that the new law lacks the mechanisms needed to ensure that the role played by the AUC in crimes against humanity is clarified.

At the MVCE conference, Pérez presented his proposal to set up a "political" truth commission along the lines of the ones that have worked in other parts of the world, like Central America or South Africa.

He asserted that under the new law, "it will not be legally possible to establish the full truth about the crimes against humanity and violent incidents for which the heads of the self-defence groups are responsible."

The London-based Amnesty International announced that it would begin lobbying potential donor governments not to finance the paramilitary disarmament under the new law, which it said would guarantee impunity for human rights abusers.

According to Amnesty, the law "fails to comply with international standards on victims’ right to truth, justice and reparation."

The rights group also said the new law fails to include measures aimed at guaranteeing that combatants are effectively demobilised, rather than being "recycled" back into the conflict, as paid military informants, for example.

Earlier this year, Amnesty noted that paramilitary fighters who laid down their arms under the new law would receive benefits including reduced prison sentences of five to eight years even if they were implicated in serious human rights abuses, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity.

And although a demobilised combatant can provide information on offences committed or witnessed, Amnesty warned that there would be no incentive for them to do so because they would not lose their benefits if it was later revealed that they had lied.

In its Jun. 15 statement, Human Rights Watch said that "in exchange for sentence reductions, paramilitary commanders should be required to give a full and truthful confession and to fully disclose their knowledge of their groups’ operational structure, sources of financing and illegally acquired assets.

"Otherwise, it will be practically impossible for the government to obtain the necessary information to uncover the truth about atrocities and dismantle these groups."

In addition, said Human Rights Watch, "the bill should provide that paramilitaries will lose all their sentencing benefits if they are found to have lied to the authorities about their crimes, operations and finances, or to have kept illegally acquired assets."

José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch, stated – before the bill was actually passed – that it was "a bad deal both for Colombians and the international community, and it sets a disastrous precedent for future negotiations with other armed groups."