The grievances of the Colombian State against the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, IACHR Court, do not stop. The presidents of the House, Jennifer Kristin Arias Falla, and the Senate, Juan Diego Gómez, sent a letter to the High Court on December 31, 2021, protesting against the follow-up Resolution of November 25, where the International Court held that the adjustments made by the Attorney General’s Office do not comply with the ruling on the impeachment of Gustavo Petro.
Arias and Gómez added that the IACHR Court is attempting to “impinge on the sovereign power of every State to create its own laws or design its institutions in the terms designated by its elected representatives” – as if the Colombian State’s decision to submit itself to the supervision of the Inter-American System for the Protection of Human Rights were not sovereign, and asked it not to make a pronouncement before the Colombian Constitutional Court rules on the issue, which would violate the “control of conventionality” exercised by the Inter-American high court over the constitutional judge.
Senator Iván Cepeda on January 4 stated that the letter of both presidents of the Senate and the House of Representatives “was daring” because they spoke in the name of the entire Congress before an international organization. In the same vein, twenty-six congressmen sent a letter on January 5 to the president of the IACHR Court in which they stated that the two directors did not represent the institutional position of the Congress of the Republic of Colombia, since it was based on their personal assessment and because the communication was not discussed or approved by the plenary sessions of the Chamber or the Senate of the Republic.
Senator Gustavo Petro on January 5 said that it is not a matter of commenting on a sentence. The Congress was obliged to comply with it because it is a judicial sentence of the highest level in the country, adding that the congressmen who voted for the law of Attorney Margarita Cabello and she herself “disobeyed justice and disobeyed the sentence that sought democracy and respect for human rights. The president of the Congress, as well as the Attorney General, should be investigated by the justice system”.
Attorney General Cabello on January 18 keeps insisting that he retains all powers to act in a preventive and disciplinary manner against alleged misconduct committed by all public officials, including those elected by the people. He added “Those who believe that the sentence of the IACHR Court protects them from incurring in disciplinary infractions are very mistaken”, a comment that completely distorts the sense of the Petro sentence. The following day he opened a disciplinary investigation against the mayor of Bogota, Claudia Lopez, for alleged political tweets.
This is not the first time that high-ranking state officials have gone against the IACHR Court. On March 15, 2020, in the Bedoya Lima vs. Colombia case, the director of the National Agency for the Legal Defense of the State, Camilo Gómez, challenged four of the six judges of the Court, questioning their power to ask questions, and withdrew from the hearing, alleging alleged lack of guarantees from the judges.
Recusing a large number of judges and leaving the table was a slap in the face for the victim, journalist Jineth Bedoya, who was kidnapped, sexually abused, and tortured, and also an insult to all victims of serious human rights violations in Colombia and in the hemisphere. The IACHR Court, in its Resolution of March 17, 2021, qualified the State’s decision to abandon the hearing as “an unprecedented action in the history of this Court, lacking justification, and absolutely disproportionate, all of which has also meant a revictimization of Mrs. Bedoya Lima”.
The attitude of reproach extended to other international organizations. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Colombia published a report referring to the events that took place between April 28 and July 31, 2021, in the framework of the protests throughout the country provoked by the tax reform of the Duque government, which ended in 63 deaths, 60 cases of sexual violence and 27 people who are still missing. The vice-president and foreign minister, Marta Lucía Ramírez, rejected it because they cannot be allowed to disqualify “institutionality and the rule of law, above all, because here there are politicians who are making politics at the cost of destroying citizen confidence in the institutions”.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, on July 7, 2021, released its report on the National Strike, which contradicted the government’s international position that in the country there is a democracy that guarantees the fundamental right to protest and that human rights violations during the strike were “isolated cases” in the National Police. On the contrary, the report evidenced a “systematization” of police repression of legitimate protests in Colombia that does not require explicit or written orders from the authorities and issued 41 recommendations to avoid a repetition of the same in the future. Vice President Marta Lucia Ramirez contested it, arguing that “Colombia has internal mechanisms to address the complaints filed for alleged cases of human rights violations”, that “the recommendations of the IACHR are not binding for the State” and therefore, the government will not comply with some of them.
The independent report for the clarification of the events that occurred during the protests of September 9 and 10, 2020 in Bogota, a product of the United Nations Development Program, coordinated by former Ombudsman Carlos Negret, and published in mid-December 2021, concluded that during those two days a massacre was perpetrated, the responsibility for which lies with the National Police. The report was rejected by President Iván Duque, on December 15, 2021: “To build political aspirations on the basis of lacerating institutions is an act of vileness, it is an act of villainy and it is also an attitude contrary to the duty to be guided by the truth and by the procedures established by the Constitution and the law”.
Let us be clear: the government of Iván Duque and his allies have been known to flout the reports and decisions of multilateral human rights entities whenever they dislike them or when they go against purely political interests. Their attitude is inconsistent with true support for human rights and the rule of law. The country deserves less resistance and politicization on the part of the authorities and more full compliance.
