In February 2018, after several months of to and fro, the Council of State of Colombia revoked a previous order to create 16 transitional seats of peace for victims of the armed conflict. According to researchers Laura Ordóñez Vargas and Douglas Rodríguez at the School of Human Sciences of the Universidad del Rosario, this concept is a clear example that Colombia continues to prioritize a definition of justice linked to the deprivation of liberty in jails.
“In the end, the argument of critics of the creation of new seats for victims was the apparent favoritism this would imply for former FARC combatants, situating the victims in the place of the aggressors, and with this revictimizing them (on not complying with what was agreed, and on putting them on a level with ex-combat ants). The message this communicates is that the victims are once again not central to the definition of justice, thus running against the principles of restorative models of justice. In our country, in normative discourse, victims are “politically correct”, but in practice there is still a long way to go,” assures Professor Ordóñez Vargas, PhD in Anthropology and main author of the study titled Restorative Justice in Transitional Contexts in Colombia: Analytical and Methodological Tools for Reflection and Application.
The peace seats case very well exemplifies what academics and the rest of the team have been coming across over almost a year and a half of research: “Colombia is still not ready for restorative justice because in our culture there is still a deep-rooted obsession with the idea of jail as the only expression of carrying out justice, and for deprivation of liberty as the privileged mechanism of controlling crime.” So, despite the country having laws for 12 years which were incorporated in the concept of restorative justice, this has been applied very timidly, with still no methodologies in place to bring it about, and even fewer indicators for evaluating its efficacy.
The final results will be known halfway through 2018, once researchers conclude several tasks under way, and they can be synthesised as: analysis of documentation (academic, legal and institutional, national and international) on restorative practices and processes linked up in transition contexts; field work in the framework of certain national experiences with elements within restorative justice and applied in transitional scenarios such as detention facilities for youths and adults, victim collectives, and justice and peace tribunals; and a revision of new institutionality for Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), among others.
On the methodological limitations in mapping restorative experiences in transition scenarios, the researchers point out that some do exist that are not defined under the actual restorative heading, although these do contain several of the principles that define this way of thinking about justice or, conversely, those that are self-labelled as restorative experiences without them being such.
Colombia is still not ready for restorative justice
because in our culture there is still a deep-rooted
obsession with the idea of jail as the only expression of carrying out justice, and for deprivation of liberty as
the privileged mechanism of controlling crime, points
out researcher Laura Ordóñez.
THE STUDY’S SCENARIOS
As opposed to ordinary (retributive) justice, which mainly seeks to punish the offender and not consider the victim part of the legal process, restorative justice aims at offenders taking responsibility for their actions and repairing the harm to the victim, so the latter needs to be central to the process. The researchers found that restorative justice experiences in transitional contexts began to appear in Colombia following the activation of “Justice and Peace Law” 975 of 2005. Since then, tension has reached extremes, stirred up by those who consider that restorative justice leads to impunity and violates victims’ rights, thus they advocate a Transitional Justice with Retributive Justice. And there are those who seek a balance between truth, justice, and peace.
“We then decided to go to transitional justice settings where restorative justice was being applied, and we reached the Justice and Peace facilities of some of Colombia’s jails, specifically that of Palmira, which housed members of the old Calima front, responsible for the Alto Naya massacre in the Cauca. We also had the possiblity of witnessing the experience of a Ministry of Justice scheme running a training initiative inside the jail, and seeing how it was being received by the prisoners,” points out Rodríguez.
Thus, the researchers found that a large amount of inmates (ex-paramilitaries) saw these restorative justice components aimed at being rules within the Justice and Peace Law as rituals without meaning in practical life, norms that basically served them to move around within processes. This is the specific case of the demand for aggressors to apologise to victims. It was an obligatory, instrumental apology that neither made the agressors take responsibility nor repaired harm to the victims.