Photo: Sonny Abesamis
Justice to Achieve Peace: Heinous Crimes, the Right to Negotiated Peace and Justice
Luz María Sánchez Duque, Nelson Camilo Sánchez León, Rodrigo Uprimny Yepes | March 14, 2014
This book seeks to contribute to the difficult debate on how to reconcile the imperatives of justice and the rights of the victims, with the internal dynamics of a peace negotiation.
This book is based on the assumption that the measures to be implemented by society and the Colombian State to overcome the armed conflict are multiple and complex. They include processes of democratic transformation on land use and tenure, opening of real spaces for political and citizen participation, effective satisfaction of the rights of millions of victims and the reintegration of several thousand combatants, among other measures. But one of the issues that has aroused greater controversy and doubt is the way to reconcile the search for peace with the State’s duty to sanction serious human rights violations.
This paper attempts to weigh both imperatives in what the authors have termed as a justice for peace. For this we understand the search for a peace that is fair and sensitive to the rights of victims; But equally a conception of justice and of the rights of the victims that allows a negotiated peace, that is a peace ethically superior to that that is obtained through the military victory. Just as it is not legally or politically feasible for a peace process to erode the rights of victims, a conceptualization of victims’ rights that precludes a peace process is not legally viable , since peace is not only a material necessity for the effective enjoyment of our human rights, but a compulsory right according to the 1991 Constitution.
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