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Council On Hemispheric Affairs
Monitoring Political, Economic and Diplomatic Issues Affecting the Western Hemisphere
Memorandum to the Press 05.113
Word Count: 2600
The EU and Colombia: Betraying Responsibility
Analysis prepared by COHA Research Associate Julian Armington
Thursday 10 November 2005
- The EU is on the verge of sending financial support to implement the atrocious Colombian “Justice and Peace Law” to
demobilize that country’s paramilitary groups.
- The law brings neither justice nor peace to a country which has suffered for decades, while granting impunity to
paramilitary human rights abusers and assuring that massive crimes will be minimally punished.
- Despite widespread international denouncements of the law, the EU, under Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero’s distressing
leadership, decided to go ahead and shamelessly pass a resolution in favor of the law.
- The move is just another example of the EU’s lack of relevance when dealing with the problems of Latin America, as
evidenced in the past year with the cases of Haiti and Cuba.
In a deeply disturbing move for local and international human rights monitors, both the EU and Iberoamerican Community
have passed declarations backing a controversial Colombian law that creates a legal framework for the partial peace
process now fitfully being seen in the war-ravaged Andean nation. This event has afforded legitimacy, and even the
proposal of considerable financial aid, on the part of the EU, for a law which otherwise has been widely viewed as
granting impunity to criminals and human rights abusers, while doing little to secure a lasting peace. The declarations
follow a summer of feverish lobbying by Colombian authorities, during which they managed to convince an international
community which desperately wanted to find a basis for hope, to put their support behind a peace process that to date
has produced only spotty results and fails to bring even a semblance of justice to the innocent victims of years of
right-wing atrocities.
ENDS
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