Colombian court ruling sentences 12 ex-military officers | FARC News

Particular court docket delivered its first sentences in opposition to state safety forces in Colombia’s decades-long warfare.

A particular Colombian court docket sentenced 12 former navy officers to between 5 and eight years of reparation work for his or her involvement in 135 “false optimistic” deaths – killing civilians after which falsely reporting them as insurgent fighters – between the years 2002 and 2005.

Thursday’s landmark ruling is the primary time the Particular Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), Colombia’s transitional justice physique, issued particular person sentences in opposition to authorities safety forces for crimes dedicated within the decades-long warfare with FARC rebels that led to 2016.

From 2002 to 2008, there have been 6,402 recorded victims of the “false positives,” in accordance with the JEP, however sufferer teams consider the quantity to be larger.

Officers used the killings, which frequently focused poor and disabled younger individuals, to inflate their reputations and earn promotions through the bloody warfare in opposition to insurgent teams, which the USA backed below Plan Colombia.

The crimes represent one in all eleven “macrocases” being investigated by the JEP, which was arrange following the 2016 peace deal to analyze abuses by rebels, paramilitaries, and state safety forces. Earlier this week, it launched its first individual sanctions in opposition to FARC leaders.

The decision focuses on one in all three subcases inside the macrocase, associated to crimes dedicated by the “La Popa” Battalion on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

The case marks a milestone in Colombia, the place households of victims have waited many years for justice over the state-sanctioned killings of susceptible family members.

“We’ve got managed to indicate the nation and the world that these younger individuals weren’t guerrillas, that they had been lured away by deception, murdered, and made to appear like guerrillas,” Blanca Nubia Monroy, whose son was a sufferer of a “false optimistic” killing, informed Al Jazeera.

Nevertheless, she mentioned that reparations work is inadequate punishment, and that the commanders ought to “pay for what they did to those younger individuals” by serving jail sentences.

Denying involvement in killings

The 12 officers convicted had been allowed to keep away from jail by confessing their involvement within the killings. They may work on six separate reparation tasks in collaboration with victims.

“This ruling in the end recognises that via this type of restorative transitional justice, we are able to cut back impunity for severe human rights violations,” mentioned Gerson Arias, battle and safety investigator on the Concepts for Peace Basis, a Colombian assume tank.

Three members of the Battalion, together with its chief, Colonel Publio Hernan Mejia, denied their involvement within the killings and now face an additional trial and jail sentences of as much as 20 years.

The “false positives” occurred below President Alvaro Uribe’s administration and stay some of the controversial episodes within the 50-year battle between FARC rebels and the Colombian state, which killed greater than 450,000 individuals.