In July, the Colombian Caravana was among the signatories to this joint letter from Colombian and National civil society.

Between November 2003 and August 2006, 30.000 members of the paramilitary forces officially demobilised in Colombia. Out of the 40 paramilitary structures that existed in 2003, 34 demobilised. Their members involved in serious human rights violations were applied the law rule of the 975 Law of 2005, called Justice and Peace Law. These regulations created a series of legal benefits for the demobilised, amongst others, alternative sentences of 5 to 8 years with the compromise of telling the whole truth regarding the committed crimes, the operative structures, the beneficiaries and the intellectually and materially responsible of these crimes.

8 years have passed since the beginning of the application of this law and in August 2014, groups of them will start getting out of prison for having completed the maximum alternative sentence of the regulations: men from the Catatumbo block, Central Bolivar and Heroes of Granada, amongst others. In its 2013 report, the Office of the High Commissioner of United Nations for Human Rights warned that: “most probably almost all the accused will be set free at the end of the eight years without having been judged”.

See the complete statement, in Spanish HERE