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The peace agreement signed by the Colombian government and the FARC has an innovative sanctioning regime which, based on a restorative approach, offers non-custodial sanctions as a less punitive form of punishment for international crimes. However, given their leniency, these 'special sanctions' have caused controversy. Based on qualitative interviews, this study explores the perceptions of different stakeholders concerning various issues related to the special sanctions' nature, goals, processes, (envisioned) outcomes and challenges. Our findings reveal that most participants perceive these sanctions as a tool that can modestly help repair the damage done, reintegrate (certain) offenders into society, and promote coexistence. Only a limited number of respondents saw these sanctions as punishment. For several participants, the special sanctions may be an alternative accountability measure to prison. However, this seems to depend on meeting certain preconditions, victims' participation, the type of crime and the offender's rank and affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article summarizes the book "Suma Paz" by Elvira Sánchez Blake, which narrates the life and death of Mario Calderón and Elsa Alvarado, social leaders in Colombia. The book highlights the importance of questioning and denouncing censorship and violence against those who seek social justice practices. It also addresses the relationship between peace and the destruction of the environment and exposes the impunity of crimes against social leaders in Colombia. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Via Inveniendi et Iudicandi is the property of Universidad Santo Tomas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Colombian journalists experience abundant threats and acts of violence as well as corporate and governmental obstacles to publishing the truth. In response, many reporters engage in self-censorship, eschewing stories to protect their livelihoods—and their very lives. Our in-depth interviews with sixteen journalists in the post-conflict era, some of whom have had to leave the country because of such threats, disclose the severity of the problem in deeply textured ways. The results show that dependency on sources and advertising, severe judicial and online harassment, and powerful editorial pressures prevent journalists from reporting freely. The generalized fear, the distribution of official advertising and political publicity, the media's property, and local journalists' vulnerability are the key factors that trigger self-censorship. Nevertheless, these journalists also have counterstrategies to circumvent the problem and further democracy, such as sharing scoops with colleagues when covering sensitive issues, finding international funding, or creating new online media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do courts play in peace processes? Relying on case studies of South Africa and Colombia, we identify two functions. First, by invalidating some peripheral provisions constitutional courts can enhance the legitimacy of those agreements by adding the imprimatur of legalism to the political support the agreements already have. Second, the international law of impunity can be an obstacle to reaching a peace agreement, but domestic courts can weaken that impediment by deferring a confrontation with that law by creative interpretation of both the peace agreement and international law, thereby postponing to the indefinite future any actual confrontation between the agreement and international law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, Colombia signed a peace agreement with the FARC-EP, thus creating The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) to prevent the impunity of actors involved in the armed conflict for serious human rights violations and breaches of international humanitarian law. In this context, the JEP is cognizant of case 001, which involves nearly 208,000 members of the military forces, victims of the armed conflict. It is evident that there are differences when guaranteeing the rights of a civilian victim and a military victim. Here, the JEP's process is addressed, determining the recognition, participation, and reparation given to victims that are part of the Military Forces in contrast to the typical guarantees of protection given to other victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are frequent cases of human rights violations, in which the protagonists are transnational companies, through their subsidiaries present in states with weak legal systems, mainly in Latin American, Asian and African countries, which do not have effective grievance mechanisms to guarantee the human rights of victims. Cases such as the death of union leaders of the subsidiaries of Coca- Cola Company Co., in Colombia, at the hands of paramilitary groups, allegedly sponsored by executives of that Company, and in which the victims have not obtained the reparation of their damages, increases the levels of impunity in the field of human rights. The foregoing, demonstrates the need for a binding human rights instrument to be enacted in the orbit of public international law, which allows for the determination of the international responsibility of transnational Corporations and the reparation of victims' damages, since the instruments currently, such as the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, of the United Nations Human Rights Council, are soft law provisions, which, although it is true, have promoted Corporate Social Responsibility, they are not binding instruments for Corporations Transnationals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how transnational borderlands matter for conflict prevention and, in particular, so-called upstream engagement, which aims to reduce threats to global stability and security that arise from the world’s increasing interconnectedness. Accounting for transnational borderlands in vulnerable regions is crucial for conflict prevention as pursued by the defence and security sector because borderlands are catalysts of the negative side of global interconnectedness: they are business hubs for transnational organised crime, sites of retreat for conflict actors, and safe havens for terrorists. The border areas’ proneness to impunity and the ability of violent non-state actors to govern these spaces illicitly contribute to the emergence of these characteristics. I therefore argue that upstream conflict prevention needs to do two things to address these risks: first, to overcome a national security approach centred on the borderline and instead acknowledge transnational security dynamics in borderlands on both sides of the border; second, to overcome the state-centred governance lens to also consider governance exerted by non-state actors. The article draws on empirical data from a six-year study including over a year of fieldwork in and on Colombia’s borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The problem of impunity has dominated the Colombian political landscape against the backdrop of almost non-stop war in the country since independence. The focus here shall be upon impunity in relation to human rights abuses regarding Colombian workers and union members. The central argument is that impunity is socially entrenched in Colombia due to an historical legacy of a weak state, a concomitant lack of institutionalised conflict resolution mechanisms and the stigmatisation of unions as havens for the revolutionary Left. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En un editorial, el autor ofrece sus reflexiones sobre la Fiscalía General de la Nación en Colombia. Más específicamente, el autor discute los esfuerzos de la Fiscalía en reformar el sistema de investigación penal. El autor discute la necesidad de una reforma de la persecución penal nacional de crímenes internacionales, y ofrece varias soluciones para resolver los conflictos en el sistema judicial de Colombia.

Copyright of Anuario Colombiano de Derecho Internacional is the property of Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Senora del Rosario and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The legal institution of military jurisdiction has been constantly questioned by considering that it has been used to abuse and it has worked as a source of impunity in front of serious human rights violations. Before the discredit of Military Justice, the military jurisdiction has been traditionally restricted, but recently it suffered an amendment that has motivated critics from many sectors, reform which established new Military Justice bodies with functions that overlap their powers together to define conflicts of jurisdiction between the ordinary courts and the military justice system, leaving doubts about the consistency by which the aforementioned theme is treated. Due to these considerations, this research seeks to clarify whether the military criminal jurisdiction is a functional guarantee, as it is constitutionally and legally established, or whether on the contrary, in practice it has been distorted by the actions of the security forces and is rather a condition of impunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the extent and impact of corruption on public trust and on the stability of the Colombian police. The effectiveness of public controls, civilian oversight, and overseeing bodies is evaluated to determine the degree of impunity and the level of independence from other agencies of control. Design/methodology/approach – The research in this study is based on data analyses of surveys, interviews, and an observational approach. This paper considers four general surveys, namely: Latinobarómetro, Iberobarómetro, Global Corruption Barometer, Corruption Perception Indexes, and World Values Survey. The observation consisted of accompanying Bogotá police department teams for two months during the evenings between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. This study draws upon 20 interviews with police officers of all ranks. Additionally, an informal observation of police activities during the night was carried out to discover the occurrence of corruption, which was impossible to reveal by a more formal observation. Findings – Although corruption in the Colombian police force is presumably a generalized phenomenon, it is still one of the most appreciated agencies among Colombians. However, scandals have been cleverly mitigated by rhetoric and apparent purges and the setting-up of inoffensive mechanisms of control. Internal inspection and civilian oversight have been weakened – rendered ineffective by an increasingly powerful police leadership. Research limitations/implications – Since corruption is a concealed phenomenon, its analysis always causes problems. Police officers are reluctant to talk about the problem and there is an organizational denial of the phenomenon. Originality/value – The paucity of academic research on police forces in Latin America is still apparent and the field of study lacks a real degree of specialization. Similarly, there has been no empirical examination of issues pertaining to the study of the modern Colombian force. This paper thus attempts to compensate for the lack of empirical research on the Colombian police. It contributes to the overall literature on police corruption by explaining the organizational features of bribing and police corruption on the beat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘liberal peace agenda’ assumes that security sector reform (SSR) and the consolidation of the rule of law are both interdependent and complementary. Evidence from Colombia and Guatemala suggests, however, that in practice conflict resolution and peace-building strategies may prioritize attaining national security over the rule of law (Colombia) or taking measures to strengthen the rule of law only when faced with serious post-conflict insecurity affecting elites and the hollowing out of the state by organized crime and criminalized elite competitors (Guatemala). Peace-builders should therefore pay particular attention to strengthening justice systems and protecting fundamental rights of citizens and victims of state and non-state violence. Strategies to increase the state's security capacity and to reform the security sector should be synchronized with an overarching rule of law agenda. In violent settings where insecurity has many faces and cuts across the blurred lines between legality and illegality security remains elusive without a stronger rule of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Representations are forms of knowledge that allow the subject or the group to appropriate external knowledge in the service of everyday life. Accordingly, the present study aims to identify the social representations on transitional justice which circulate in the Colombian press. For this reason, we use some specific techniques of the Social Representations Theory (SRT) to explore their content and structure. It also uses a multi-methodological approach associating qualitative and quantitative techniques, as are armed observation, content analysis and discourse analysis. The investigation is found through methods and supports in the referring of the SRT in order to describe the cognitive dimension of the Colombian press on the transitional justice. So, it's important to identify the Social Representations that constructs the Colombian press in order to analyze the impact of the press during the period "the Colombian transitional justice". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of URVIO - Revista Latinoamericana de Seguridad Ciudadana is the property of FLACSO - Ecuador (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Araucaria is the property of Araucaria-Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofia, Politica y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Low-intensity conflicts, counter-insurgencies, and the so-called war on terror blur the boundaries between war and peace and, in doing so, collapse the distinctions between combatants and non-combatants. Scholars have used concepts such as ‘routinization of terror’, ‘culture of fear’, and ‘banalization of violence’ to describe how fear regulates social life in places of extreme instability. These concepts often paint an overgeneralized portrait of violence that fails to examine the social relationships and institutional forms that give rise to terror and insecurity. This article examines the shifting qualities of war and peace in Colombia and argues that daily life in Barrancabermeja—a working-class city nominally ‘at peace’ after a government-backed, paramilitary demobilization process—is a volatile arena of uncertainty in which some people are more vulnerable than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how state terrorism operates alongside neoliberal capitalism and has reconfigured labor relations and generated new forms of oppositional politics. Focusing on the struggles of Colombian Coca-Cola workers, the article first considers how neoliberal restructuring and political violence have fragmented social relationships and aggravated inequalities among workers and between them and the Coca-Cola Company. This is a process that is based o widespread impunity. The article then examines how trade unionists have struggled against the degradation of work and the violation of their human rights by internationalizing their struggle against Coca-Cola and building broad alliances that extend beyond the workplace. Finally, it considers the problems, possibilities and new tensions that emerge from the union's internationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using peace research as its base, the article includes direct accounts of communities that have been affected by political violence in Colombia and support from analytical international experience of reconciliation as they pertain to the significance of reconciliation from the victims' viewpoint This article proposes that reconciliation can no longer continue to be considered by the State and armed actors, but it must also be based upon the views of the victims. This is necessary to bring an end to the cycle of violence and begin building the foundations of a stable and lasting peace. From the victims' perspective, reconciliation is equivalent to the right to the truth, the defeat of impunity, and integral reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]