April 27, 2022
Today, Corporate Accountability Lab (CAL) reaffirms our support for the Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz (CIJP) and its commitment to sustainable peace in Colombia. In the last few days, public attacks against the work of CIJP have increased. CIJP is being falsely accused of influencing inmates to benefit a presidential campaign. We at CAL cannot remain silent in light of these attacks against one of our closest partners in Latin America.
For years, we have witnessed CIJP’s commitment to the promotion of a sustainable peace through restorative justice and the accompaniment of thousands of victims of the decades-long Colombian armed conflict, including Afro-descendant, indigenous and campesino communities. These communities are often left without redress for the harms they suffered or tools to fight for their rights and a peaceful future. In this context, we have observed CIJP’s approach to achieve peace, reparation and guarantees of non-repetition through restorative justice.
This approach often involves the development of spaces where victims and perpetrators come together for dialogue, consensus building, and reconciliation in the interest of promoting peace and social repair, with the consent and direction of those most affected by the armed conflict. It requires contact with perpetrators of crimes and human rights abuses, including convicted criminals who are in prison. These visits are not unusual in Colombia nor in the U.S. Within a restorative justice framework, these exchanges are part of a broader context where impacted communities are active participants. CIJP has made these initiatives public and developed associated and unique strategies where communities, directly-impacted victims, and those responsible for the harms committed during the conflict come together through workshops, encuentros de memoria, an educational curriculum known as the Universidad de Paz, and other spaces designed to rebuild the social fabric of society.
In 2019, building off of this important work, CAL, CIJP and other partners launched a project designed to examine the role of economic actors in the armed conflict within a transitional justice context. Historically, although economic actors, including multinational companies, have financed and otherwise contributed to abuses committed in the Colombian armed conflict and other civil conflicts around the world, they have rarely been held to account. This project applies a multifaceted approach designed to analyze the role of economic actors in transitional legal frameworks, including the Truth Commission (Comisión de la Verdad, CEV) and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP. Together, we advocate for the inclusion of corporate actors in the Colombian transitional mechanisms, create spaces to develop parallel accountability mechanisms with a restorative justice focus, and design replicable strategies. In this context and based on our work with communities and victims, CAL and our partners design recommendations for the development of sanciones propias, a set of measures that perpetrators would have to adopt if they want to benefit from the JEP. These measures seek to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions and include work and activities that span both restorative justice and traditional justice frameworks.
We fear that the recent attacks against CIJP, particularly Danilo Rueda, undermine and hinder CIJP’s essential work with impacted communities in regions historically marginalized.While CAL’s work with CIJP is limited to the role of economic actors, CIJP’s broader work with military, paramilitary, guerrilla, political third party actors, and victims is crucial to sustainable peace in Colombia, and provides key analysis and context for our joint projects. We stand with our colleagues at CIJP against these attacks, and emphasize that their work in support of restorative justice transcends the polarized political environment in which they operate.
