This serious sequence of events has had a profound impact on the nuclear families of the five human
rights defenders; the children were particularly affected. No one has ever been made to answer for any of these
events.
The Commission believes that all these events occurred because of the State’s failure to fulfill its
heightened duty to protect and respond, a duty that was even more pronounced because of the particular risk
that the women defenders of human rights were facing given the discrimination they had historically suffered,
the particular nature of their work, and the heightened danger in areas under the control of the actors involved
in the armed conflict.
The Colombian State ratified the American Convention on Human Rights on July 31, 1973, and accepted
the contentious jurisdiction of the Court on June 21, 1985.
The Commission has designated Commissioner José de Jesús Orozco Henríquez and Executive Secretary
Emilio Álvarez Icaza L. as its delegates. Likewise, Elizabeth Abi-Mershed, Deputy Executive Secretary, and Silvia
Serrano Guzmán and Rosa Celorio, attorneys with the IACHR’s Executive Secretariat, have been designated to
serve as legal advisors.
In keeping with Article 35 of the Rules of Procedure of the Inter-American Court, the Commission is
attaching a copy of report 86/13, prepared pursuant to Article 50 of the Convention, and a copy of the complete
file of the case with the Inter-American Commission (Appendix I) and the annexes used in the preparation of
report 86/13 (Annexes). The State of Colombia was notified of that report by a communication dated December
3, 2013, and was given two months to report on its compliance with the recommendations.
When the Colombian State requested an initial extension, the Commission granted it a three-month
extension and asked the State to submit a report on the progress it had made toward compliance with the
recommendations. By a communication dated May 20, 2014, the State requested another extension. After
examining the report presented by the State, the Commission concluded that it did not reflect any significant
progress toward compliance with the recommendations. In particular, the investigative efforts, although
relevant, have had no meaningful impact in terms of compliance with the obligation to investigate all the facts
of the case. Furthermore, the information available indicates that the record on a number of cases remains
closed.
Furthermore, the State has not come forward with a concrete proposal on the matter of reparations. In
its report, the State mentioned the framework through which the eventual reparations would be channeled, but
did not go into the specific reparations it plans for the victims in the case, the program for implementing the
reparations, or how the reparations measure up to the standards of full reparation.
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