Monitoring compliance

Both the United Nations and the Organization of American States possess specialized mechanisms and procedures for promoting member States’ compliance with the respective human rights treaties they have ratified. The UN’s Treaty Body system is made up of six expert committees, each set up to oversee the implementation of one of the UN’s main human rights treaties. The Human Rights Committee monitors compliance with the ICCPR, the Committee on the Rights of the Child does the same with respect to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and so on. All six committees periodically review Colombia’s progress in complying with its international obligations under the corresponding treaties. According to numerous UN reports, Colombia has consistently failed to comply with most of the international obligations promoted by this system.

The main political organs within the United Nations that promote compliance with human rights and humanitarian law norms are the Commission on Human Rights and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, who maintains a permanent office in Bogotá. Both are very active in monitoring the war in Colombia. In her latest report, issued February 18, 2001, the High Commissioner stressed that the situation had deteriorated significantly during 2000, and that the ongoing violations of human rights "[could] be qualified as grave, massive and systematic." On April 24, 2001, the UN Commission on Human Rights issued a detailed statement on Colombia echoing the High Commissioner’s concern. The Commission condemned the grave violations of international law by all the parties to the conflict, and placed special emphasis on the crimes committed by paramilitary groups acting in concert with state forces.

The OAS system has only two levels of review: the Inter-American Commission and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which operate within the framework established for the region by the American Convention on Human Rights. As is the case with the UN, Colombia has in recent decades been the object of intense scrutiny by these organs of the OAS system. In 1999, the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights published its Third Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Colombia. The Commission’s report examined a wide range of human rights and humanitarian law issues in light of the American Convention and related international humanitarian law norms, namely, those expressed in Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol II. The Inter-American Commission concluded that Colombia was not meeting its legal obligations under the American Convention.

II. Universal Jurisdiction and International Criminal Law

In addition to the classic international law obligations established by the aforementioned treaties, the war in Colombia (or anywhere else) is subject to a growing body of norms collectively referred to as international criminal law. The basic difference between the UN and OAS treaties discussed above and international criminal law is that the former are binding only on states while the latter focuses primarily on individuals. This means that the assignment of international responsibility for illegal acts is fundamentally different.

Violations by government agents of a human rights treaty give rise to international responsibility on the part of the state that ratified it, not the agents who carried out the criminal act, who must be prosecuted under local laws. A good example of this dynamic is the case decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 1995 which found Colombia responsible for the forced disappearance of two persons by army units in violation of the American Convention. The Court ordered the Colombian State to compensate the victims’ families and to take steps to ensure that the perpetrators were brought to justice. The army officers, soldiers and civilians involved in the disappearance were not themselves directly the subject of the Court’s decision, which centered instead on establishing the state’s international responsibility under the treaty. They were, however, investigated by the Colombian judicial authorities for this crime.