Dear Friends,

This month there is a petition regarding Venezuela, two Urgent Actions relating to Argentina and Paraguay together with an alert for a future Urgent Action relating to Bolivia. Killings of HRDs in Colombia continue to rise and the President of Colombia refuses to sign an important Bill. We have news on Indigenous rights in Colombia,  Brazil and Paraguay,  an update on the Marielle Franco case (Brazil) and criminal proceedings against two journalists in Peru.

VENEZUELA

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has reported to the Human Rights Council on the human rights crisis in Venezuela.  Amnesty welcomed the commitment to stand by the victims of the crisis in their fight for truth, justice and reparation.  Given the scale and gravity of the crisis, and the severe obstacles to justice in Venezuela, Amnesty has urged the UN Human Rights Council to create a Commission of Inquiry to monitor and report on the situation and to clarify responsibility for crimes under international law and gross human rights violations.  You can still sign the petition here.

Luis Carlos Díaz, a Venezuelan journalist and defender of digital rights and freedom of expression, was arrested in Caracas on 11 March by the Bolivarian Intelligence Service and accused of alleged “cyber-crimes”.  Amnesty has declared him a prisoner of conscience, detained solely because of his widely respected work covering the Venezuelan people’s demands to live in dignity in their country and for his denunciations of the authorities’ response to the crisis.  Amnesty has demanded his immediate and unconditional release. 

COLOMBIA
An accumulation of grievances, aggressions against indigenous leaders and the rupture of talks with the Government have led the National Indigenous Organisation of Colombia (ONIC) to call for an indefinite national mobilisation with a five-point platform:

• In defence of the rights to life, peace and human rights.
• In defence of land rights
• In defence of economic, social, cultural and environmental rights
• Unfulfilled agreements by the government with the social movement in Colombia
• To enforce compliance with the 2018-2022 Development Plan

          The uprising includes 15,000 Indigenous protestors, who have blocked the Pan-American Highway for the last 17 days. Colombia has not seen such a concerted anti-government campaign by its indigenous citizens since 2008.

The Colombian NGO Somos Defensores (We Are Defenders) report that 32 human rights defenders were killed in the 3rd quarter of 2018, an increase of 14 (77%) on the same period for 2017. As in previous quarters, most victims were community and environmental leaders in rural areas. 6 were women, 3 indigenous and one Afro-descendant. Of the 128 aggressions reported against HRDs, 59% came from paramilitaries, 5% by the Armed Forces and 2% by the guerrillas. The remainder are unknown. You can download the report in Spanish here

President Duque has refused to sign a bill, approved by Congress and the Constitutional Court, to provide the JEP (Special Jurisdiction for Peace) with a statutory law. The JEP was created to ensure justice for the victims of the conflict within the framework of the principles of truth, reparation and non-repetition. The following day the UN’s Verification Mission to Colombia stated ‘It is regrettable that, more than two years after the signing of the Final Agreement, the JEP still does not have a Statutory Law, a solid legal framework that guarantees its operation in full exercise of autonomy and independence, key principles that the UN, through the Security Council, has repeatedly indicated as indispensable. We fully expect that the JEP will receive, from all the country’s authorities, the political and practical support for its functioning. This support will determine, to a large extent, whether victims’ rights are placed at the centre of peacebuilding.’ In a further twist, the JEP has announced it is investigating 40 of its own prosecutors for corruption.

27 March the UK NGO Justice For Colombia reports that two farmers were murdered and 500 families displaced by paramilitaries in northern Colombia. ‘Paramilitaries in Córdoba are targeting people working in voluntary substitution programmes to replace coca plantations with legal crops, one of the core components of the 2016 peace agreement.’ According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, almost 7,000 people have been forcibly displaced in Colombia since the beginning of the year. 6.5 million Colombians have been forcibly displaced since the beginning of the conflict. [Read more…]