[ad_1]
The Permanent People’s Court, a court of opinion that has judged dictatorships in Latin America and other human rights violations in different parts of the world, is meeting today in Colombia, where it will study around 40 cases of social and political groups victims of persecution. and extermination.
In March 2020, the then United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights Defenders, Michel Forst, was the protagonist of a diplomatic disagreement with the government of Iván Duque. On that date, the rapporteur presented his report on the situation of defenders in Colombia, which had a radically different vision, and more critical, than the one presented by the Government.
The rapporteur even denounced that the Colombian government had been so unhappy with his report, that he obstructed a second visit to the country to complete this document during 2019. Today, the French and former UN rapporteur goes to Colombia again, this time as one of the judges who will try the Colombian State for genocide, crimes against peace and impunity in the Permanent Peoples’ Court.
In the middle of the Vietnam War, in the 1960s, as a result of the actions of the United States in that confrontation, the intellectuals Bertrand Russel and Jean Paul Sartre decided to establish a figure that would allow the role of the North American country in Vietnam to be put to trial. , which in no other instance was to be examined. What they founded later became known as the Russel Court, which was replicated years later to judge dictatorships in Latin America during the 1970s.
(You may be interested in: “The pandemic aggravated the five armed conflicts in the country”: ICRC)
Directly from that experience, the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (TPP) was born in 1979, “as an initiative to make permanent a tool that would be available to peoples who had the same problems in Vietnam: a repression of their rights without the international court or an independent judge could be found ”, explains in conversation with this newspaper Gianni Tognoni, Italian epidemiologist and human rights defender who works as secretary general of the TPP.
Before him and the president of the TPP, Phillipe texier, a letter was filed in April 2020 that requested that the court meet in Colombia for the third time in its history, in order to examine this time “the systematic extermination of human rights defenders in Colombia, including leaders and social leaders, and the bases of the organizations that fight for peace, the defense of the territories, the restitution of lands dispossessed with violence, the substitution of crops for illicit use and alternative development, the denunciation of socio-political violence, violations of human rights, compliance with the Peace Accords and the structural impunity that maintains the actions of criminal structures and those responsible for these persistent genocidal practices ”.
Since then, the more than 300 social organizations convening the court, gathered in the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (Movice) and in the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination (CCEEU), documented and assembled the arguments to present before the court around 40 cases that occurred in the country with which they seek to demonstrate the existence of genocidal practices, crimes against peace and the persistence of impunity.
The cases that will be presented to the court this Thursday in Bucaramanga, on Friday in Bogotá and on Saturday in Medellín they can be grouped into three large groups. First, the cases of movements and political parties victims of persecution and extermination, among which are the Gaitanista Movement, the Colombian Communist Party and the Communist Youth, the National Opposition Union, the A Luchar movement, the Popular Front, the Union Patriotic and, likewise, the current situation of the FARC ex-combatants, which already has 259 murders and which will be presented by former guerrilla Victoria Sandino.
(Read also: Albeiro Parra: “This government wants to deepen the war”)
In a second group is the union sector, with the cases of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores, the Unión Sindical Obrera, the National Union of Workers of the Agri-food System, the National Agrarian Coordinator, the Student Movement and the Peasant Organization in Carmen and San Vicente from Chucurí (Santander), Cajibío (Cauca) and Casanare. According to the National Trade Union School, from 1971 to July 18, 2020 there were 15,245 acts of violence against the trade union movement in Colombia. Threats were the main victimizations, with 7,492 cases, after homicides, with 3,270 and forced displacement with 1,952 cases, some of them included exile. And the third group is made up of a series of historical cases, such as the massacres of the Bananeras and Santa Bárbara, the Independent Republics, the case of Villarrica (Tolima), among others.
“It is intended to demonstrate the existence of a genocidal practice based on five elements: that there was a common identity to the group, that it had a regional or national character, that it had a political platform, that there was an extermination process in different ways: assassinations, massacres, disappearances or imprisonments, and that this weakened organizational processes and that there were beneficiaries of this, ”explains Soraya Gutiérrez, vice president of the José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective (Cajar) and spokesperson for the CCEEU.
Is it a symbolic judgment? For the general secretary of the TPP, Tognoni, this is not the case. “I make a diagnosis as a doctor of a fatal disease. That diagnosis is substantial, it is true. I am obliged to say that for that disease I have no remedy. Is my diagnosis symbolic due to the fact that I do not have the means to apply it, or is it structural, because it tells a truth despite the fact that this truth cannot be translated at this moment into a change towards what it should be? ”, holds the Italian. For him, the importance of the court is that it “calls things by name”.
And he exemplifies it with the situation of implementation of the Peace Agreement in Colombia: “If one says ‘the Colombian case has been solved because they have signed a peace agreement’, international politics has a clear conscience, it is satisfied with a declaration of principles or a peace pact. No, the court says’ we are going to see not what is written, but the real subjects, what is happening in Colombia in terms of non-collaboration of the Government. And explain that this can happen without the Government taking an open position saying ‘I do not recognize the Peace Accords’; on the contrary, it recognizes the Peace Accords, but says we don’t have the money to back it up, we don’t have how.
(We recommend: War colleges: other victims of the conflict)
In this session for Colombia, in addition to Michel Forst, the French Philippe Texier, the Italian Luciana Castellina, the Nicaraguan indigenous lawyer Lottie Cunningham Wren, the president of the Frantz Fanon Foundation, Mireille Fanon, the Italian Luigi Ferrajoli and Monsignor Raúl will act as judges. Vera, from Mexico, among others, for a total of 13 judges.
This Wednesday, 19 congressmen from the opposition to the Government sent a letter to President Duque, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Claudia Blum, and the director of the State Legal Defense Agency, in which they demanded their presence in the sessions of the court.
“From the Congress of the Republic we consider that the recognition of the Court and the participation of the National Government within the sessions proposed by the TPP is fundamental, not only from the exercise of the right of defense, but from a position in which the responsibility before the national and international community regarding the seriousness of the denounced events, as a transcendental action in the vindication of the rights and guarantees of the violated groups ”. Although the Government has not ruled on the matter, an ex officio defense is foreseen in the event that it does not send representation to the trial.
For its part, there will be a Prosecutor’s Office in charge of formulating the accusation to the Colombian State, made up of the former magistrate of the Supreme Court of Justice Iván Velásquez, who was also president of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala; and former prosecutor Ángela María Buitrago, who has participated in the investigation of the forced disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico.
After the session in Colombia, the TPP will issue a ruling that is formally presented before the United Nations Human Rights commissions, before the European Union and before the International Criminal Court to promote an international debate on the findings. According to his secretary general, that verdict belongs to the movements that called the trial. “It means giving the movements with the backing of the court a legitimacy beyond just being minorities saying something.”
(You may be interested in: JEP: a transitional justice that prioritizes ethnicity, women and the LGBT population)
“What we hope is that with the sentence the recommendations that the Truth Commission will make in terms of guarantees of non-repetition can be influenced so that those structural issues that have been behind the genocidal practices can be addressed to establish an agenda of what the Colombian State should do so that the murder of social leaders, peace signatories, indigenous and peasant communities does not continue to be repeated. Likewise, although it is not a judicial ruling but an ethical one that appeals to the voices of the victims, we believe that it can serve as an evidentiary document within the litigation of the cases that advance in the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and in the JEP, as a document probative ”, concluded Soraya Gutiérrez.
We recommend reading and listening:
* (Podcast): Gonzalo Sánchez, the “porterito” of memory.
* “Courts of transitional justice should have jurisdiction over all agents in the conflict”: UN.
* Former President Santos will give his version of the conflict before the Truth Commission.
