Journey to A Post-Conflict Society: Colombia’s Transitional Justice System

Abstract

With the rise of internal conflicts and insurgency groups since the end of the Cold War, international norms regarding human rights have grown exponentially, developing into international law that seeks to hold States accountable. While not all countries are party to international justice mechanisms like the International Criminal Court, human rights undoubtedly concern the entire international community. Armed conflicts that boast longevity and depth of reach are therefore especially worrisome in the face of norms and institutions that aim to ensure respect for human rights and protect the victims of the conflict. Colombia, a country that has suffered from an armed conflict lasting more than a half century, has recently begun its transition from a post-settlement to a post-conflict society with the culmination of the Final Agreement to End the Conflict and Build a Stable and Lasting Peace. However, Colombia’s successful journey to a post-conflict society is contingent upon the functionality of its newly created transitional justice system. A particularly precarious yet critical component of Colombia’s Transitional Justice System is the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. In order for Colombia to achieve sustainable peace and protect victims’ rights, the extrajudicial and judicial aspects of the system must work to complement each other. After World War II, the international community recognized its responsibility to ensure that states that had carried out “wars of aggression” against third states and their own populations would suffer international legal ramifications (Olasolo, 2015, pp. 9). These international efforts were carried out through the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, followed by the Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man in April of 1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment on the Crime of Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both ratified in December of 1948 by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the Geneva Convention of 1949, and the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights of 1950 (Olasolo, 2015, pp. 9-10). Overall, the international community was “judicialized” following both World Wars (Simmons & Danner, 2010). Collectively, these declarations and conventions establish a set of international norms that obligate the state to fulfil its duty to protect its population. This new international standard, however, does not mean each state has since abided by the norms created. In the post-Cold War era, it became difficult to hold states accountable and guarantee that perpetrators guilty of gross violations of human rights would be prosecuted, especially with the rise of armed conflicts and insurgencies. Moreover, Olasolo (2015) maintains that the international community failed to subject world hegemons to fair judgement in the post-Cold War world. He argues that this failure is grounds for an overall weak commitment to human rights and thus, the need for collective responsibility among states (pp. 1215). Simmons & Danner (2010), however, explain the push for international justice mechanisms as being correlated to the disintegration of Cold War bipolar stability. They contend that states sought to “tie their hands” following a turbulent period in an effort to discourage civil conflict by increasing the costs to the return to violence (Simmons & Danner, 2010, p. 227). Regardless, the creation of international justice prevailed in the context of instability and internal conflicts, despite its criticisms for being a “tool of imperialism” and an “enemy of peace” (Encarnación, 2011). In 1998, the UN Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court (ICC) resulted in the culmination of the Rome Statute, approved INTRODUCTION International Affairs, ESIA ‘19, efarris@gwu.edu