BOGOTA, Sept 3 (TrustLaw) - Colombia urgently needs to reinforce the rule of law and reform its justice system to maintain security gains made against rebel groups and to combat drug-related violence and organised crime, the regional head of a leading think tank has said.
An eight-year military offensive against the country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), allowed government troops to regain control of some guerrilla strongholds and re-establish the state’s presence in conflict-ridden areas.
But focusing almost exclusively on a sustained U.S.-backed military campaign against the FARC has come at the expense of much-needed judicial reform and good governance, said Markus Schultze-Kraft, the head of International Crisis Group’s Latin American and Caribbean programme.
“The government’s response has to be more than a military one and needs to entail institutional strengthening, structural reform in the judicial system and a substantial increase in the legitimacy of public authority,” Bogota-based Schultze-Kraft told TrustLaw in a telephone interview this week.
“The military struggle focus did far less work in tackling criminal outfits.
“They (the Colombian government) have not gotten a grip on pervasive illegality and criminality which risks undermining the country’s institutions.”
As the new conservative government of President Juan Manuel Santos completes its first month in power, there is increasing recognition among government and army officials that winning the war against the 10,000-strong rebels and drug traffickers requires not only keeping up the military pressure against the 45-year-old insurgency.
But the rule of law can only be reinforced by simultaneously pushing forward with widespread judicial reform, while tackling political corruption and high levels of impunity, said Schultze-Kraft.
The government has made judicial reform a priority in a bid to speed up Colombia’s notoriously slow and dysfunctional justice system and clear a heavy backlog of cases.
Earlier this week, Santos announced tougher laws against corrupt public officials, children carrying weapons and juvenile crime. The government also wants to introduce new laws to make it easier for the authorities to seize and sell property belonging to captured drug traffickers.
The newly appointed army chiefs say more local judges and state prosecutors are needed in all municipalities, including remote rural and jungle areas formerly controlled by rebel groups, who were known to dish out justice and settle local disputes.
Santos has promised to improve the training and monitoring of judicial officials, and also vowed to employ 500 new judges dealing with minor crimes during the next four years.
But Schultze-Kraft said strengthening the rule of law went far beyond increasing the numbers of judicial officials and involved focusing on good governance.
“Colombia not only needs to think more about increasing the numbers of judges but must think more about democratic governance, which means introducing mechanisms of accountability into institutions that actually work and introducing elements of transparency that actually work.
“It’s no good having 25 more judges if they can be bought.”
In a country where just seven out of 100 murders are solved, high levels of impunity are fuelling drug-related violence and undermining government efforts to tackle organised crime.
Some government officials complain that captured gang members and drug barons are too often given lenient sentences, placed under house arrest rather than behind bars, and are sometimes set free because of legal loopholes and entrenched inefficiencies in the justice system.
** For a factbox about impunity in Colombia please click here **
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