Colombia Seeks to Rein in Rights Watchdog

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia Seeks to Rein in Rights Watchdog
By JOSHUA GOODMAN
Associated Press Writer

July 12, 2006, 11:03 AM EDT


BOGOTA, Colombia -- President Alvaro Uribe's government is lobbying to restrict a U.N. agency that has been the most trusted monitor of human rights violations in Colombia, according to foreign diplomats and rights activists.

The diplomats say Colombian officials are trying to remove the agency's right to publicly criticize human rights abuses and publish an annual report on one of the hemisphere's worst rights records. And with the U.N. human rights office's four-year mandate expiring in October, the agency is particularly vulnerable, they say.

The U.N.'s Bogota office, one of 34 such missions around the world, has verified 8,100 human rights abuses in Colombia since it was founded in 1997, implicating rebels, paramilitaries and government forces alike in Colombia's four-decade old civil war.

The agency recently revealed details of the killings of 29 civilians in the last 18 months, including pregnant women and children, by security forces who claimed the victims were rebels. Rights groups say the U.N.'s work helped lead to the arrest of 18 soldiers, an embarrassing development for the law and order Uribe.

Now Uribe's government has been lobbying foreign governments to drop the agency's independent monitoring role and limit its work to technical support for the Colombian government, according to the diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
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http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-colombia-un-human-rights-lh1,0,1207595.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

[Judi Lynn]

1. Colombia and Human Rights

article | posted November 6, 2003 (web only)
Colombia and Human Rights
Nina Englander

"We will not raise our children for war," is the oft-repeated statement of the Popular Women's Organization (OFP), a group in Barrancabermeja, Colombia, that works with displaced communities to defend human rights. Yet an outspoken commitment to protect one's children can be enough to become a target of Colombia's violent political war.

On October 16, Esperanza Amaris Miranda, a leading member of the OFP, was abducted from her home in Barrancabermeja and murdered. In the past, Miranda had denounced paramilitary threats before the federal prosecutor. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Right's office, she was killed by three members of the paramilitary group Bloque Central Bolívar, an organization with documented ties to the Colombian military.

Murder and abduction of social activists in Colombia is not uncommon. In the town of Barrancabermeja alone, there have been ninety-four assassinations and fifty-six kidnappings this year. Throughout the country, there were 6,978 murders, disappearances or combat deaths as a result of political violence between July 1, 2002 and June 30, 2003. The Colombian Trade Union Congress estimates that in 2002, 172 trade unionists were killed, 164 received death threats and 132 were arbitrarily detained by authorities. Paramilitary groups, with the support of the Colombian armed forces, carried out many of these attacks.

Despite the extremely dangerous climate for social activism, the Colombian government continues to blatantly disregard human rights. Recent inflammatory statements by President Alvaro Uribe drive this point home. Speaking on September 8 before leaders of the armed forces at the inauguration of the new head of the airforce, Uribe condemned human rights defenders as terrorist sympathizers and cowards. He derided unspecified groups for supporting terrorism "under the pretext of defending human rights," and for hiding "their political ideas behind human rights." He called human rights workers "spokespeople" for terrorists, and he challenged them to "take off their masks."
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20031124/englander