by Lisa Haugaard
on June 11, 2010
Colombia’s outgoing President has launched an assault against his country’s courts for taking some initial steps to bring high-ranking military and government officials to justice for their role in murder, illegal wiretapping, disappearances and torture. This is no abstract political debate. When the President takes to the airwaves to denounce those working for justice, the judges, lawyers, witnesses and victims’ families know that death threats, and sometimes murder, often follow. The threats and attacks usually appear to be from paramilitary groups. Colombia’s Supreme Court made a call for help: “We make an appeal to the international community to accompany and show solidarity with the Colombian judicial system which is being assaulted for carrying out its duties.”
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by Lisa Haugaard
on May 25, 2010
As I listened to mothers and sisters and sons describe how they found their loved one in the morgue of a Colombian army base, dressed up in a guerrilla uniform when they knew he was a civilian, I was not only saddened, I was stunned by the striking similarity of the cases. From Casanare, Meta, Cauca, the facts were so similar. Witnesses saw the person being taken prisoner by a group of army soldiers. They went looking for him, thinking he’d be detained on the army base. Then they were shown a photo or the body of their relative, dead and claimed by the army as killed in combat.
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by Vanessa Kritzer and Lisa Haugaard
on June 10, 2010
On Tuesday night, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in Colombia; by today she'll be in Barbados. During her 24 hours in Colombia, do you think she heard much about the rise in threats and attacks against Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities in Colombia? Did President Uribe talk with her about the illegal wiretapping that part of his special intelligence service used to sabotage the work of human rights defenders, journalists, and Supreme Court judges? Or would you guess she talked with any of Colombia's almost 5 million internally displaced people about how they have been robbed of their land and forced to live in misery?
We doubt it. But these issues are exactly what she must be thinking about as the State Department prepares to make its most important decision on U.S.-Colombia policy this year.
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by Lisa Haugaard
on May 12, 2010
As Colombians go to the polls May 30th, they will elect a president who
will have a historic opportunity to change the lives of millions of
Colombians affected in profound and tragic ways by the country’s
enduring armed conflict. The Latin America Working Group and partner
organizations have sent an open letter to Colombia’s presidential and
vice presidential candidates to ask them how they will lead the nation
in building a more just and inclusive society that promotes and respects
the rights of all its citizens.
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by Vanessa Kritzer
on May 28, 2010
Death threats, attacks and assassinations. Human rights defenders and indigenous, afro-descendant, and IDP leaders in Colombia often face these terrors, but lately there has been a major spike in these actions—and we’re worried. This past week, LAWGEF and our partners released a public statement to the Colombian and U.S. governments, calling on the Colombian government to take action now to investigate and prosecute these threats and attacks, protect the people at risk, and make it publicly clear that human rights defenders’ work is legitimate and important.
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by Lisa Haugaard
on April 20, 2010
In March, two major annual human rights reports on Colombia were
released by the State Department and the United Nations High
Commissioner on Human Rights’ office in Colombia. They highlight some
advances, most notably a decline in killings of civilians by the army
(extrajudicial executions), but point to numerous ongoing problems,
including the major scandal of illegal wiretapping by the government’s
DAS intelligence agency, a pronounced slowness in achieving justice in
extrajudicial execution cases, threats and attacks against human rights
defenders and failures by the government in protecting them, a
resurgence of illegal armed groups following the paramilitary
demobilization, and sexual violence in the context of the conflict.
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