Jan Sochor. All rights reserved.
While peace negotiations continue in the Cuba's capital Havana, there are indications that the Colombian authorities are already setting out the way that the country will tackle the problems of transitional justice in the years following any successful conclusion of peace agreements. In this short contribution we set out concerns that the current Senate Bill (number 85 of 2013, submitted to Congress by Defence Minister Juan Carlos Pinzón Bueno in September 2013), which seeks to reform the military justice system, will exacerbate the challenge of post-conflict transitional justice in Colombia by implicitly offering a form of immunity to the military for serious breaches of international human rights and criminal law carried out during the armed conflict.
The ‘false positives’ scandal
Any conclusion of the peace negotiations, which will put to an end decades of armed conflict between the state, the FARC and ENL, will be the beginning of a long and potentially painful process of transitional justice. A significant part of this process will be the investigation of the truth surrounding the murders and forced disappearances of many innocent civilians, and the criminal prosecution of key perpetrators. The state’s willingness to investigate and prosecute crimes committed by its own agents will be central to the process of reconciling Colombia’s violence. Confronting the scale of the ‘false positives’ scandal and the collusion between state agents and military groups (including criminal gangs) will indicate the sincerity of Colombia’s efforts to excavate the most difficult passages of its armed conflict.
