This online webinar will explore the upcoming report of the Truth Commission in Colombia, with a focus on two innovative measures within the Colombian transitional justice approach: the role of business in conflict and peacebuilding, and the exclusion of crimes of sexual and gender based violence from amnesties in the Colombian conflict. The panel will examine the intersectionality between gender and ethnic discrimination and conflict sexual violence in Colombia.

One of the most significant peace agreements of recent times was signed in Colombia in 2016, aiming to end over 50 years of brutal and deadly armed conflict. While not perfect, the Peace Agreement in Colombia offered the most potentially transformative agreements seen to date in terms of peace processes globally, promising peace in a generation.

Despite this promise of change, implementation has been slow and piecemeal. Threats, attacks and killings of human rights defenders have continued, killings of former combatants have escalated, as has violence in the rural areas, and the number of victims of massacres having quadrupled.

This panel will discuss the critical role of transitional justice, and the international community, in supporting those working on issues of human rights, peace and justice in Colombia.

Please join us for a discussion of these issues with a panel of experts on Colombia. The event is co-hosted by ABColombia, Christian Aid Ireland and the Transitional Justice Institute of Ulster University.

Once registered, a link to join the webinar will be shared by email.

SPEAKERS

Pablo de Greiff is currently Senior Fellow and Director of the Transitional Justice Program at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice of the School of Law at NYU. He was the UN’s first Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence. He is former Research Director for the International Center for Transitional Justice.

Leigh A. Payne is Professor of Sociology and Latin America at the University of Oxford, St Antony's College.

Laura Bernal-Bermúdez is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. She is also affiliated to the Latin American Centre of the University of Oxford as a research consultant.

Their new book, with Gabriel Pereira, is Transitional Justice and Corporate Accountability from Below: Deploying Archimedes' Lever (Cambridge University Press, 2020) tracks and analyses transitional justice mechanisms for holding economic actors accountable for human rights violations in dictatorships and armed conflict: international, foreign, and domestic trials and truth commissions from the 1970s to the present in every region of the world.

Eamon Gilmore is the European Union Special Representative for Human Rights (since March 2019) and has also served as EU Special Envoy for the Colombian Peace Process since October 2015. He was Ireland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade from 2011 until July 2014.

María Adelaida Palacio Puerta is a lawyer specializing in education for citizenship and a lecturer in human rights with a background in teaching, consulting, working as a public official and work in women’s organisations. She served as Undersecretary of Government of Bogotá; coordinator of the legal area of Corporación Humanas; consultant for the National Women's Network, IOM and USAID. Currently, currently she works as Manager of the Sisma Mujer Corporation, a partner of Christian Aid Ireland.