This event opens the floor to Francia Márquez Mina to discuss what Afro-Colombian transitional justice is, how Afro-Colombian communities see the work of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and the Truth Commission, and how we can understand these developments in the context of the ongoing armed conflict in Colombia.
On 11 August 2020, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) prohibited any kind of tampering in two places – La Escombrera (The Dump) and La Arenera (Sandpit), both located in the Comuna 13 area of Medellín – where victims of forced disappearances are thought to be buried. The JEP can order precautionary measures where there are good reasons for doing so in the framework of its cases. This snapshot presents the progress that the JEP has made in protecting the remains of those who disappeared during the armed conflict in Colombia.
The international community has been a fundamental support to the Peace Agreement with the FARC-EP. From the start of the negotiations, the accompanying guarantor countries —Cuba, Norway, Chile and Venezuela— were vital to building confidence between the parties and ensuring that dialogues continued in the most difficult moments. An additional impulse to discussions came from the concrete support provided by other actors that appointed special envoys to the peace process, such as Jean Arnault for the United Nations, Bernie Aronson for the United States, and Eamon Gilmore for the European Union.
With Law 1448 of 2011, known as the Victims and Land Restitution Law, and presidential decrees 4633, 4634, and 4635 that followed, the Colombian state created a system of reparations (The Victims Unit, Land Restitution Tribunals, administrative processes, etc.) for victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. This is considered to be the most ambitious reparations programme in the world, as it includes humanitarian assistance measures for victims, contemplates every form of reparation (restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-recurrence), while aiming to provide reparations for more than 8 million victims.
The contributions of ethnic populations to peacebuilding and social and economic development in Colombia was acknowledged in point 6.2, known as the Ethnic Chapter of the 2016 Peace Agreement signed between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP. This acknowledgment signalled the historic conditions of exclusion, slavery, physical and cultural extermination, and land dispossession that ethic populations have suffered.
The Unión Patriótica (UP) political party was born out of the ceasefire, peace, and truce agreements signed between the government and FARC-EP in 1984. The UP emerged as a political movement with legal guarantees for the insurgency to participate in political scenarios through elected offices. Support for the party grew, especially in remote regions of the country, leading to the election of 19 departmental deputies, 286 local council members, and several representatives in Congress. Following this success, paramilitary groups, state agents, and some political factions carried out an offensive against UP leaders and militants amounting to political genocide of the party. In 2014, the Office of the Prosecutor-General of Colombia declared some of the crimes against members of the UP as crimes against humanity.
One element of the SJP is the Investigation and Accusation Unit (IAU) that is the only body within the JEP with judicial police powers. The unit has 16 prosecutors and one director and is tasked with investigating and bringing criminal charges in those cases where the alleged individual or collective perpetrators of serious human rights violations and International Humanitarian Law do not recognise the truth or accept their responsibility.
One element of the SJP is the Investigation and Accusation Unit (IAU) that is the only body within the JEP with judicial police powers. The unit has 16 prosecutors and one director and is tasked with investigating and bringing criminal charges in those cases where the alleged individual or collective perpetrators of serious human rights violations and International Humanitarian Law do not recognise the truth or accept their responsibility.
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