The Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a resounding ruling on the case of the genocide of the Patriotic Union (UP) by the Colombian State, which was found responsible for the violence and disappearance of each of the members of this party in the 1980s and part of the 1990s.
This was also announced by the Attorney General’s Office, which made the sentence public through its X account. It stated: “The Inter-American Court of Human Rights declared the State of Colombia responsible for the systematic and generalized violence through acts of forced disappearance, assassinations, massacres, extrajudicial executions, threats, attacks, improper prosecutions, torture and forced displacement, among others, which led to the extermination for political reasons of the Unión Patriótica political party”.
In view of the decision of the Inter-American Court, the prosecutor also indicated that the body ordered as a measure of reparation that these facts be known by society, so that they do not happen again, with “the publication of the sentence through the official social networks of the Presidency of the Republic, the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Attorney General’s Office”.
The Inter-American Court also established several measures to guarantee the memory and reparation of the victims: the construction of a memorial, the creation of a commission to verify the identity and kinship of the victims, the carrying out of comprehensive and systematic investigations to establish the truth of the facts, and the search for the whereabouts of the missing victims.
The case that reached the international body is “Members and militants of the Unión Patriótica vs. Colombia”, in which the high court indicated that the State was responsible for the systematic and widespread violence to which the members of the UP were subjected.
The judgment was issued on June 27, 2022 by the IACHR Court, after thoroughly investigating the situation of the victims of the UP and the defense of the Colombian State. In addition, on June 29, 2018, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights submitted to the jurisdiction of the Court the case “Integrantes y militantes de la Unión Patriótica” against the Republic of Colombia.
“The dispute concerns the alleged serious human rights violations committed to the detriment of more than six thousand alleged victims who were members and militants of the political party Unión Patriótica (hereinafter also “UP”) in Colombia starting in 1984 and for more than twenty years. The Commission described these acts as extermination and held the State responsible,” the judgment states.
The Patriotic Union was a socialist political organization that was formed on May 28, 1985 to seek a peace process between the National Secretariat of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian Government.
This movement was led by then President Belisario Betancur and the party suffered some of most severe political repression in the hemisphere, by US-backed fascist paramilitaries, narcotraffickers and the far right state.
The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) stated that the results of the analysis carried out by the Truth and Responsibility Recognition Chamber showed that, of the 5,733 victims, 4,616 were victims of homicide and 1,117 were forcibly disappeared.
Of that total, 5,195 were UP militants and 538 victims who were not members of the Patriotic Union were killed or disappeared in acts of violence directed against that political party.