Colombia’s war crimes tribunal warns ICC that De la Espriella supports «worst attack in history» – Colombia News

Colombia’s war crimes tribunal JEP said that it would warn the United Nations and the International Criminal Court about plans of President Abelardo de la Espriella to cut its budget.

In a statement, JEP president Alejandro Ramelli raised the alarm warned about a pending proposal by far-right Senator Enrique Gomez (National Salvation) to reduce the tribunal’s budget by COP100 billion ($31.6 million), which received De la Espriella’s support.

A second proposal by another far-right party, the Democratic Center, sought to push all sentences against members of the security forces to military justice for revision.

According to Ramelli, the two bill proposals “prove the existence of a strategy to block the JEP’s functioning” and called on the international community to “put a stop to this effort to dismantle our financial system and calls for the essential resources needed for our operations to be guaranteed.”

These initiatives constitute a combined strategy of economic strangulation and the subjugation of the JEP to military criminal justice. It is the most serious attack we have ever faced against our independence and autonomy.

JEP president Alejandro Ramelli

The president , who vowed to get rid of the JEP on campaign, said that the 2027 national budget “does not constitute any threat to any judge, it’s the Constitution at work.”

I do not have a policy of retaliation against the JEP. I have a duty to manage spending, demand results, and allocate the State’s limited resources to a justice system that serves everyone, not to a court that part of the country perceives—for reasons debated in Congress and in public opinion—as a system of privileges rather than an effective end to impunity.

President Abelardo de la Espriella

Since March of 2018, the JEP has played a key role in clarifying crimes committed during the armed conflict that erupted in response to the insurgency of the now-defunct guerrilla group FARC.

Among other things, the JEP found that the guerrillas recruited more than 18,000 children and that the security forces assassinated more than 7,800 civilians to inflate their combat kills.

Hundreds of former guerrillas and former members of the armed forces are taking part in a transitional justice system that seeks to solve as many as possible of the hundreds of thousands of crimes committed during the decades-long armed conflict.