Transitional Justice

The differential inclusion of Ethnic Peoples in the transitional justice mechanisms within Colombia has been the result of many fights, organizational processes and advocacy actions carried out by these peoples in the face of the lack of political will on the part of institutional actors to recognize and repair the serious individual and collective effects suffered by indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants in the framework of the armed conflict and the continious historical structures of racism, racial discrimination, exclusion, violence, dispossession and physical and cultural extermination. However, and despite said inclusion, the materialization and guarantee of the rights of ethnic peoples to truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition is still a pending debt on the part of the State.

The creation of the Comprehensive System of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition, through Legislative Act 01 of 2017, represented an advance in this regard. The three mechanisms of the System (the Commission for the Clarification of the Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition, the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and the Unit for the Search of Persons Considered Missing Persons) have carried out prior consultation processes alongside Ethnic Peoples and they have built routes and protocols of relationship amongst them.

The JEP created an Ethnic Commission, built a protocol for the coordination, articulation and intercultural dialogue between the Special Indigenous Jurisdiction and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, and has made progress in developing mechanisms for the participation of Ethnic Peoples who consider themselves victims of the facts being investigated in the territorial macro-cases of Nariño (Case 002), Urabá (Case 004) and Cauca (Case 005). For its part, the CEV has made progress in the construction of technical and methodological guidelines for the inclusion of an Ethnic Approach against racism, racial discrimination and related forms of intolerance, which is materialized, among other actions, with the inclusion of an Ethnic chapter in a final report. Finally, the UBPD has included a chapter for Ethnic Peoples in the National Search Plan.