The Colombian government must do more to help women sexually abused by warring factions, Amnesty International says in a report
BOGOTA (TrustLaw) - The Colombian government must do more to provide justice and support to the thousands of women and girls who have been raped and sexually abused by warring factions in the country’s long-running armed conflict, rights group Amnesty International said on Thursday.
Colombia has been mired in fighting between state security forces, leftist rebels, cocaine smugglers and right-wing paramilitary militias for nearly five decades. All of these armed groups are responsible for sexual violence against women, according to an Amnesty report.
“By failing to investigate effectively sexual violence against women, the Colombian authorities are sending a dangerous message to perpetrators that they can continue to rape and sexually abuse without fear of the consequences,” Marcelo Pollack, Colombia researcher at Amnesty International, told TrustLaw in a telephone interview.
Armed groups exploit women and girls as sexual slaves and use sexual violence against them to instil fear among communities, to get revenge, and as a way of imposing social and military control in an area, the report said.
Colombia has no national register for sexual violence against women, making it difficult to gauge the extent of the problem, but local and international rights groups say there is little doubt sexual violence is under-reported.
Many survivors are too afraid to come forward or have little faith in the justice system’s willingness to take the crime seriously and punish their attackers, the Amnesty report said.
“There’s still so much stigmatization of survivors, especially conflict-related crimes,” Pollack said. Women simply do not feel confident (enough) in the justice system to denounce cases of sexual violence. They not only fear retribution but there’s also a lack of state institutions, especially in remote and rural areas,” he added.
FEW CONVICTIONS
Since 2010, the government of Juan Manuel Santos has introduced a number of laws and state bodies to push forward investigations involving sexual abuse and rape but they are not being used effectively, Pollack said.
“There’s been very little change in how the state treats and supports women,” he said.
“The problem in Colombia has never been about the lack of decrees and legislation but about implementing laws across the country.”
Survivors of sexual violence are also known to face discrimination by public officials.
“One woman was told by an official she was too ugly to have been raped by a paramilitary commander because with his power he could have had anyone he wanted,” Pollack said.
Along with discrimination, survivors of sexual violence and other human rights abuses face several obstacles to getting justice, including “bureaucratic inefficiencies, underfunding and infiltration by illegal armed groups and organised crime,” the Amnesty report stated.
The taboo on talking about the widespread use of sexual violence in Colombia’s conflict is slowly breaking down, following the demobilisation of over 30,000 paramilitary fighters as part of a peace deal with the previous government.
Under controversial legislation known as the Justice and Peace Law, some 3,000 paramilitary fighters, many of them middle and high ranking commanders, qualified for reduced prison sentences in return for laying down their arms and confessing to human rights violations, including sexual violence.
But seven years after the law was introduced, only one paramilitary fighter has been convicted of sexual crimes, the Amnesty report noted.
The persistent failure of the government to prosecute those responsible for sexual violence could lead to the involvement of the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague. “We believe there are grounds for the International Criminal Court to step in and investigate cases of conflict-related sexual crimes in Colombia,” Pollack said.
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