Opaque Justice
The balance of powers constitutional reform substituted the discredited Judiciary Superior Council (Consejo Superior de la Judicatura) with a new Judicial Government Council (Consejo de Gobierno Judicial, CGJ), among other things, to achieve greater transparency in the judiciary. However, the medicine could result worse than the disease due to the opaque and questionable manner that the CGJ is being integrated.
Read MoreThe Judiciary’s Foxes
There’s a German saying that goes: “when foxes preach, be careful with your geese.”
Read MoreFrog’s Luck
Only a month from the climate change global summit in Paris, humanity acts as the proverbial frog in the pot: floating in water that slowly warms, without realizing that we are almost at the boiling point.
Read MoreDejusticia: a decade thinking about a just peace
In Colombia, the last ten years have been dramatic in terms of peace and rights. The country has faced an enormous flux of demobilized ex-combatants, has seen a dynamic movement of victims grow, and to account for all of that, has witnessed the creation and development of countless official laws and institutions in charge of hundreds of proceedings for victims and ex-combatants.
Read MoreThe Magical Reality of Egypt
But I am not writing to expose the gravity of enforced disappearance, as it is a well-documented crime. Instead, I am going to shed light on how reality meets fantasy in Egypt, where the very forces of security and justice, are the gravest threat to Egyptians’ security and justice.
Read MoreSolicitor General: Are You Quashing Atheist Communism?
The solicitor general wants to politically destroy the most important and valuable senator from the left in Colombia.
Read MoreConfusion in the ICC
With Georgia under investigation and Colombia working hand by hand with the ICC towards a peace agreement with guerrillas, the complementarity of the Rome Statue system seems sufficient, but the whole picture is more complicated.
Read MoreDisappeared, War, and Peace
In my last op-ed I invited readers to imagine peace as an antidote to our perrenial war.
Read MoreDemocracy without the State
This Sunday’s regional elections will probably be the most peaceful of the last four decades. But it is possible, according to experts, that they will be the most corrupt of recent times.
Read MoreDisappeared
Among the infamies of our internal conflict, one of the greatest, due to it being the most hidden, is the forced disappearance of thousands of people: the students and activists evaporated at the hands of state intelligence bodies under the Security Statute 35 years ago, the “false positives” of the army a few years ago, the social and rural leaders removed by the paramilitaries in the nineties, the soldiers kidnapped by the FARC that never reappeared. All united by uncertain stops and the suffering of families that continue to search for them.
Read MoreIn defense of silence
Nothing less popular in a noisy country than silence. Nothing more scarce in the digital world that stillness. It is impossible to concentrate like that, to think. And that’s how we do.
Read MoreLegal interceptions: more questions than answers
The “interceptions syndrome” arouses suspiciousness before a recent and of difficult application Decrete: technically, it isn’t easy to reconcile the obligation of investigating the guilty with the rights to privacy, the habeas data and the freedom of expresion.
Read MoreThe non reasons for the extended the military jurisdiction (II)
A second reason that is often invoked to extend the military jurisdiction is that it aims to give military and police men more juridical security. But this second justification isnt’ neither convincing nor acceptable, as was the first one, that I revised in my las column.
Read MoreLand restitution: is it a trap?
Since the expedition of the Law of victims, many broad debates have developed themselves in relation to the restitution policy. The most recent one emerged with tregard to the formal installment of the peace dialogues.
Read MoreInterbolsa and the regulations’s sins
By chances of the sociologist’s trade, a few years ago, I ended up studying the world of the stock market.
Read MoreRecreational cannabis, will it fall or will ir be regulated?
The legalization of the carriage and consume of cannabis in Colorado and Washington, as some analysits have pointed it out, can be the beginning of the end of prohibitionism, or at least an opportunity to debate better alternatives of policies, that are less expensive in both economic and human rights terms.
Read MoreThe non reasons for the extended the military jurisdiction (I)
None of the reasons invoked to extend the military jurisdiction is neither convenient nor acceptable.
Read MoreHuman Rights: New Threats in the Hemisphere
In her novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Álvarez describes an international mission to visit the Mirabal sisters when two of the four women were in jail for opposing the Rafael Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Three of the sisters were later assassinated on November 25, 1960—a date later designated by the United Nations as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
That mission was an historic landmark in the Americas: the first on-site visit carried out by what became the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
Read MoreThe still pending answers of the Cerrejón
The sudden decision of Cerrejon of suspending the studies to divert the Ranchería river and explote coal in its bed left more questions than answers.
Read MoreThe decline of prohibition?
Last tuesday two votings took place in the United States that may be even more important for Colombia and Latin america than the reelection of Obama: in the states of Colorado and Washington (not the federal district), a majority of citizens approved the legalization of cannabis.
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