Colombia: Prosecution of False Positive Cases under the Special Jurisdiction for Peace
March 28, 2016
Colombia: Prosecution of False Positive Cases under the Special Jurisdiction for Peace
Human Rights Watch Analysis
On December 15, 2015, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas announced an Agreement on the Victims of the Conflict that creates a ‘Special Jurisdiction for peace’ in charge of handling “grave violations of human rights and international human rights law.” The special jurisdiction would handle atrocities committed both by FARC guerrillas and by members of the Colombian armed forces. Four days later, the government announced a set of ‘guidelines’ describing the terms applicable to state agents. This analysis shows how the rules announced by the government and FARC could be used to ensure broad immunity for state agents who perpetrated war crimes or crimes against humanity, including creating a shield against prosecution for the systematic execution of as many as 3,000 civilians—known as false positive cases—committed by army brigades across Colombia between 2002 and 2008.
Are prosecutions of false positive cases in the ordinary justice system going to be transferred to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace?
In the absence of any enforceable guarantee otherwise, many, if not all, the investigations and prosecutions of false positive cases carried out by Colombia’s Attorney General’s Office likely will be transferred to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.
The Agreement on the Victims of the Conflict states that the new jurisdiction will handle cases by the armed forces that are “related to the armed conflict and [were] committed in occurrence of it.”[ii] The guidelines for state agents broaden this provision by establishing that the Special Jurisdiction will have “exclusive jurisdiction” over crimes committed by state agents “in occurrence of the conflict, that were caused by the conflict, or [that were] directly or indirectly related to it.”[iii]
Colombian courts have already determined that hundreds of false positive cases were related to the armed conflict by trying such cases as “homicides of protected persons,” a crime defined under Colombian law as a type of homicide committed “in occurrence and during the development of the armed conflict.”[iv] Similarly, the Colombian Supreme Court has held that “there is no doubt that the so-called false positives… are closely linked to the internal armed conflict, since the conflict was a necessary condition for such excesses to take place.”[v]
Furthermore, several officials from the Colombian government–including the Minister of Defense and the Deputy Attorney General—have reportedly stated that all the false positive cases could be transferred to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.[vi]
More:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/03/28/colombia-prosecution-false-positive-cases-under-special-jurisdiction-peace
