Columns & Blogs

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Héctor Abad Gómez. As a good public health worker, he believed that children should be vaccinated, adults should adopt hygiene measures, food should be improved and people should not kill each other fighting. In short, he fought against the two epidemics that kill most people: poverty and war.

If we want to overcome the post-truth era and escape the the polarization that threatens us, Colombia needs a solid but informed public debate; a debate with vigor but without lies, falsehoods or unjust attacks like the one I was subjected to last week by the ex Inspector General Alejandro Ordóñez.

In Colombia, only 18 euthanasias have been practiced in two years of regulation. In Canada, however, in just six months of an equivalent standard, more than 800 euthanasias have been performed. A society must be judged not by how it treats the most powerful, but those who are in the weakest conditions.

Today enforced disappearances continue to be used as a political weapon, not only in dictatorships like Venezuela, but in democracies, countries undergoing internal conflict, and political transitions.

Perhaps the constitutional prohibition of paramilitarism will not magically make disappear this atrocious phenomenon and its consequences in Colombia. But it would mean a big step in building a robust policy to prevent and punish it, along with the actions that have made it possible.

Lawyers in Colombia do not control themselves (self-regulation) nor allow themselves to be controlled. Everything begins with law faculties, which teach and do whatever they want, or almost do so. But the most serious comes later, when students obtain the title of lawyers and can choose between being a litigant, judge, professor of law, notary or public official.

To understand and overcome corrupt practices, one must see the rest of the iceberg: the vast majority of irregular behaviors, which may not be so spectacular or visible, but without which there would be no more serious crimes.

This measure - which undoubtedly causes alarm and creates problems - is necessary to mitigate the damages caused by the inability of the Colombian State to provide this basic service quickly and efficiently. Six necessary clarifications on a Law that has been poorly understood.

Whoever becomes the High Commissioner for Peace, will have to continue with a legacy that, above political and sectoral interests, prioritizes safeguarding the essence of what was agreed.

Our rulers and politicians have accustomed us to speeches where they say that boys and girls are at the center of their governments and policies, but the reality is different. That is why it is time to put children in the center of the state and not at the margin where they have always been.

The criticism to the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) of being unacceptable for violating the prohibition of criminal retroactivity is actually confusing two related, but distinct things: retroactivity of laws that create crimes or aggravate penalties, which is not admissible in a democracy; and retroactivity of criminal courts, which is appropriate in certain circumstances.

President Trump threatened the North Korean president this week with a "fire and fury" attack that, he said, "the world has never seen before." It is incredible that the stability of the planet is in the hands of such characters. How is it possible that despite so many advances that humanity has had our institutions are in the hands of clumsy and volatile characters?