Rights violations hang over new Colombian president

[Judi Lynn]

Rights violations hang over new Colombian president
Monday, June 28, 2010
By Juan Forero, The Washington Post

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The verdict last week was a milestone: A distant court affiliated with the Washington-based Organization of American States held the Colombian government responsible for the 1994 assassination of a prominent senator.

A lion of a radical political party whose members were slain by the hundreds, Manuel Cepeda was shot dead in an operation partly organized by Colombia's army. But the 16-year-old case is no anomaly in a country suffering from a simmering, half-century-old guerrilla conflict. Hundreds of cases of murder and massacres, old and new, are coursing through the inter-American justice system.

As President Alvaro Uribe prepares to leave office in August after eight years in power, investigators at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the OAS, are grappling with many of these cases. The most recent have triggered a firestorm in Colombia and as far away as Europe: the army's systematic killing of peasant farmers to inflate combat kills and revelations that Mr. Uribe's secret police spied on opponents, foreign diplomats and rights groups.

"If you put all of this together, the extrajudicial executions, the espionage of human rights defenders, it's all really a constant over the years," Santiago Canton, an Argentine who has headed the rights commission for nine years, said by phone from Washington. "That's very dangerous."

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http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10179/1068840-82.stm