http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46460

RIGHTS-COLOMBIA:  Fact-Finding Mission "Shocked"
By Constanza Vieira

THE HAGUE, Apr 10 (IPS) - A delegation of seven British Labour members of
parliament and 10 trade union leaders from the U.S., Canada and Britain said they
were in a "state of shock" over what they heard during a week-long fact-finding
mission to Colombia.

In a strongly worded statement read out in Spanish at a press conference
Wednesday in the Colombian Congress, the parliamentary and labour mission
accused the government of right-wing President Álvaro Uribe of being an "accomplice
of crimes against humanity."

Crimes against humanity are defined by Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court (ICC), based in this city in the Netherlands, as "any of
the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack
directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack: murder;
extermination; enslavement; deportation….; imprisonment…; torture; rape, sexual
slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilisation…; persecution
against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic,
cultural, religious, gender (grounds)...; (or) enforced disappearance of persons".

The Rome Statute went into effect in Colombia in November 2002 for crimes against
humanity, as well as genocide, which is defined in Article 6. But this country availed
itself of Article 124, which allows a signatory state to refuse to accept the jurisdiction
of the ICC with respect to war crimes "'alleged to have been committed by its
nationals or in its territory" for seven years – a period that ends in November this
year.

For now, the ICC prosecutors are keeping Colombia under observation.

"We have no doubts, given the evidence received, that the Colombian government of
Álvaro Uribe and the security forces are accomplices in human rights abuses," says
the communiqué read out by British Labour MP Sandra Osborne, a member of the
House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.

"We are also convinced that the murderous activities of the paramilitaries are
approved of and actively supported by the government and the army," the statement
says, referring to the far-right militias commanded by drug lords, which partially
demobilised after negotiations with the Uribe administration.

These crimes are aggravated by the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators, and the
judicial system’s failure to prosecute the criminals and those who gave the orders, it
adds.

Colombia has been in the grip of a civil war since 1964, when the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas
rose up in arms.

The paramilitary groups, in their present form, emerged in the 1980s to combat the
leftist insurgents alongside the government forces.

An October 2008 report by the London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International
states that 1,300 civilians were killed outside of combat in 2006 and 1,400 in 2007,
while some 270,000 people fled their homes in the first half of 2008 - a 41 percent
increase in forced displacement with respect to the previous year.

According to the European Union, only eight out of 100 homicides lead to a
conviction in Colombia, and at least 1,200 civilians have been killed since mid-2002
and passed off by the Colombian military as guerrillas or paramilitaries killed in action.

In its seven-day visit to Colombia, the mission gathered information on human rights
abuses and violations of labour rights, and met with a wide range of actors from
Colombian society, covering civic, political, judicial and military interests and including
trade unionists, students, teachers, indigenous people, peasant farmers, trade union
lawyers, human rights defenders and released FARC hostages, said the statement
read by Osborne.

Since 2008, the FARC has released eight politicians it had taken hostage with the
hopes of negotiating with the government a swap of hostages for imprisoned rebels.

Three other political hostages, including former presidential candidate Ingrid
Betancourt, escaped or were rescued, along with a number of soldiers and police
being held by the guerrillas.

The parliamentary and labour delegation travelled to the eastern oil-producing
department (province) of Arauca, on the border with Venezuela, where they heard
the personal accounts of local people affected by the war, and visited the women’s
prison and imprisoned local human rights activist Martín Sandoval.

They also met with Uribe and high-level officials, but their reaction was not published
locally.

Instead of imprisoning the real criminals, the government has imprisoned trade
unionists, members of the political opposition, and human rights defenders like
Sandoval, says the statement, which calls for his "immediate release, and the
immediate release of other political prisoners and trade unionists."

The members of the mission announced that when they return to their countries,
"we will be calling for an immediate end to all military and political support for the
Colombian government."

They also urged that no free trade agreement with Colombia be approved until
human and labour rights are respected in an internationally verifiable manner.

The free trade deal negotiated with the United States has been held up by
Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Congress over similar concerns about violence
against trade unionists in Colombia.

But in Canada, the conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper tabled
the Canada-Colombia free trade agreement on Mar. 26, which means parliament had
21 days from that date to debate its ratification.

And the second round of talks between three Andean countries – Colombia, Peru and
Ecuador – and the European Union on a free trade deal took place in mid-March in
Lima, Peru.

The fact-finding mission warned that it would publicly expose the complicity of
multinational corporations in violations of human and labour rights in Colombia.

The members of the mission said they would work to put an end to the
criminalisation of legitimate, democratic opposition, support eventual peace talks and
a hostage-prisoner swap between the FARC and the government, and work to bring
to a halt the extrajudicial executions of civilians passed off as battlefield casualties by
the Colombian army.

The delegation included Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle, a former British defence minister
who resigned in 2000, unhappy with some of then Prime Minister Tony Blair’s policies.

The mission was organised by Justice for Colombia, a British NGO created in 2002 – a
year when 184 trade unionists were killed in this country, considered the most
dangerous place in the world to be a labour activist.

Justice for Colombia is a coalition of 40 British trade unions, along with trade councils,
NGOs, academics and MPs, "who support the Colombian people and trade union
movement in their struggle for peace with social justice."

In September 2007, Justice for Colombia drew the ire of Colombian Defence Minister
Juan Manuel Santos when it urged Britain’s recently inaugurated Prime Minister
Gordon Brown and his foreign secretary to halt military aid to Bogotá.

British military aid to Colombia is second only to U.S. aid, of which Colombia is the
third biggest recipient, after Israel and Egypt.

The 2007 "End British Military Aid to Colombia Petition" was signed by all of the then
members of the Labour Party National Executive Committee who did not form part of
the government, all of the Labour MPs in the European Parliament, dozens of British
Labour MPs, and all of the trade unions affiliated with the Labour Party.

"Colombians tend to believe this kind of declaration is extremely important, and that
something will start to happen now," like a change in policies of military aid to the
government, human rights activist Lilia Solano told IPS by telephone from Bogotá.

"But we have to wait and see what results will be achieved; we aren’t sure it will be
that effective," she added. (END/2009)


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