Colombia must pay US$215 thousand for death human rights worker

[Judi Lynn]

Colombia must pay US$215 thousand for death human rights worker
Thursday, 25 December 2008 13:05



The Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned Colombia for not having protected a murdered human rights worker. The state must now pay his family US$215 thousand compensation.

Human rights worker Jesús María Valle Jamillo was murdered in 1998 after denouncing the involvement of high ranked military personnel in the massacres of Al Aro and La Granja in Ituango, Antioquia.

The state is condemned because it failed to protect Valle, despite numerous death threats. In the aftermath of his murder, authorities also allowed delay in the investigation and prosecution of the case.

The court rejected NGOs' accusation the government had been compromising the freedom of expression, the honor and the dignity of the murdered NGO, because then governor of Antioquia Álvaro Uribe called Valle an "enemy of the armed forces". According to the court, that accusation can not be proved.

http://colombiareports.com/colombian-news/news/2409-colombia-must-pay-us215-thousand-for-death-human-rights-worker.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. He knew the Colombian right-wing clowns were going to kill him. What a heavy burden.

Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo Assassinated
By Frank Bajak
Associated Press Writer
Friday, February 27, 1998; 10:05 p.m. EST

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Gunmen burst into an office
Friday and shot to death a leading human rights
activist who had accused the army and top politicians
of sponsoring death squads.

Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo, 53, was slain in the
frugal downtown Medellin office where he practiced law,
police and colleagues said.

One of the few Colombian human rights workers bold
enough to publicly accuse the military and top regional
politicians of sponsoring paramilitary groups
responsible for thousands of killings over the past
decade, Valle had casually remarked in an interview
with The Associated Press last October that he expected
to be killed soon.

``My days are numbered,'' Valle said with a resigned
smile in his book-lined office. ``I've had a good
life.''

The country's leading human rights organization, The
Colombian Commission of Jurists, said it suspected
landowner-backed paramilitary groups in the killing.

~snip~ ``This is a death that should really shake up the
country,'' said Ricardo Mejia, an activist and friend
of Valle reached by telephone at the slain lawyer's
office in the capital of Antioquia state, one of
Colombia's most violent.

~snip~
More than a dozen leading Medellin human rights
activists were slain in the late 1980s and early 1990s
and Valle was one of a few who continued to maintain a
high public profile.

http://www.colombiasupport.net/199802/ap022798.html

Almost nothing whatsoever available on this man in English. No surprise there!

[Judi Lynn]

2. Mentioned in a UN report:

~snip~
Colombia stands out as a country where defending human rights is an extremely
dangerous profession. In the first nine months of 1999, two human rights defenders were killed
and dozens more were threatened. Two academics who also worked in favour of human rights
were murdered. On 31 January, Julio González and Everardo de Jesús Puerta, who worked for
the Committee of Solidarity with Political Prisoners, were shot and killed by presumed
paramilitaries after they were forced off the public bus in which they were travelling in
Antioquia. Subsequent threats forced the Committee to suspend activities for several months.
Earlier in January, four employees of the Popular Training Institute were kidnapped on the
orders of paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño. The four were later released unharmed, but
Mr. Castaño warned that he would continue to target so-called parasubversives working in
human rights organizations. A few months later, Castaño’s forces kidnapped
Senator Piedad Córdoba, President of the Senate Human Rights Commission. She too was
released unharmed, but threats from Castaño issued after her release led her to flee the country
temporarily.

3. In 1999, Colombia’s Attorney-General formally charged Castaño with ordering the 1998
murder of Jesús María Valle, president of the “Héctor Abad Gómez” Human Rights Committee
in Antioquia. Despite this promising initial step, no moves were taken to mount the operation
necessary to arrest him. The Attorney-General’s office did arrest several individuals accused of
killing human rights lawyer Eduardo Umaña in his Bogotá apartment in 1998. Nevertheless,
those who ordered the killing remain unidentified. Several human rights groups closed their
doors because of threats, among them a group working with the families and survivors of the
killings in Trujillo in the early 1990s. At least 30 other defenders were also forced to leave the
country in 1998 and 1999.

4. Surveillance of some groups was open and aggressive. One group reported being filmed
from the twelfth floor of a neighbouring hotel, prompting them to request bulletproof glass for
their twelfth-floor windows. Telephones were tapped, and callers could hear agents eating,
turning newspaper pages and listening to music. One group discovered that a false NGO set up
by military intelligence monitored their activities, and fear was rife that the military and
paramilitaries had placed operatives within offices to report on the movements of key leaders.
The administration of President Andrés Pastrana allocated US$ 4 million to protect human rights
defenders in 1999, but monies were slow to materialize, short of what was promised, and often
short-lived, including for much-needed measures like bulletproof glass, radios, taxis, and police
protection at offices.

More:
http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/0/519cdaaf99a8e4e9802568ab0050c791/$FILE/G0010500.pdf

[Judi Lynn]

3. Struggling for life under the risk of death: Human Rights Defenders in Colombia

Struggling for life under the risk of death:
Human Rights Defenders in Colombia

On April 18th 1998, José
Eduardo Umaña Mendoza,
opened the door of his residence
to three “journalists”
who sought to interview him.
He found, instead, three
armed people who proceeded
to tie and gag him, before
shooting him six times in the
head. Umaña, a leading jurist
and human rights advocate,
had made the mistake of
denouncing the continuos executions and human
rights violations against indigenous peoples, trade
unions, workers and peasants, as well as the responsibility
of military and civilian authorities, for abuses
against human rights activists. Of late, he’d been
working on re-starting the investigations on the death
of an ex-presidential candidate.

Umaña’s death came less than two
months after the extra-judicial
execution of Jesus María Valle
Jaramillo, a lawyer, founder-member
and president of the “Hector Abad
Gomez” Permanent Committee for
the Defense of Human Rights of
Antioquia. Valle Jaramillo, who had
received repeated death threats
motivated by his public revelations concerning the
joint activities of paramilitary groups and members of
the police in the North of Antioquia was shot to death
in the center of Medellín.

Human Rights defenders have been the constant
objects of persecution in Colombia since the early
80’s. Dozens of human rights workers have been
murdered by paramilitary groups, while dozens more
have been threatened or have gone into exile to save
their lives. The Permanent Committee for the
Defense of Human Rights, for example, has had 29
of its members murdered. Other organizations
present similar numbers.

Paramilitary and military groups associate human
rights defenders - who denounce the human rights
violations committed by them - with “subversives”,
and they blame them for discrediting the Colombian
Armed Forces. Soon after the Commander of the
Army, Gen. Manuel José Bonnet Locarno, told El
Espectador newspaper that the accusations of
human rights organizations such as the CINEP
(Center for Investigations and Popular Education - a
leading human rights group) greatly hurt the armed
forces, two CINEP associates where shot to death in
their homes.

The work of human rights defenders is also threatened
in other manners. In May, government agents
broke into the offices of the Inter-congregational
Commission for Justice and Peace, where they
proceeded to make copies of all documentation
relating to the “Never Again” project - a compilation of
information about human rights
violations in Colombia.

Threats against human rights
defenders extend to those working
outside of Colombia. Last April,
Colombian lawyer Luis Guillermo
Pérez Casas, who had been denouncing
human rights violations in
Colombia before the UN Commission
on Human Rights, received a phone call at his
home in Brussels, threatening his 11-year-old son.

The UN Commission on Human Rights has recently
passed a Declaration for the Protection of Human
Rights Defenders, and while we should hope that the
Declaration will in turn be issued by the General
Assembly, and eventually become a human rights
treaty - more immediate measures are necessary to
protect human rights defenders in Colombia. The
Colombian government must be urged to stop all
repressive actions against human rights defenders,
and to comply with their responsibility of investigating
and punishing all instances of human rights violations.

http://www.derechos.net/wi/june98.pdf

[Judi Lynn]

4. Inter-American court finds Colombia guilty in assassination

Inter-American court finds Colombia guilty in assassination
Submitted by WW4 Report on Wed, 12/31/2008 - 04:47.

Ten years from the fact, the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (CIDH) found the Colombian government guilty of the assassination of Jesús Maria Valle Jaramillo, an attorney and human rights defender of Medellín, in the northwestern department of Antioquia. The ruling, reminds the civil society Institute for People's Empowerment (IPC), is the first handed down by the special tribunal of the Organization of American States (OAS) against Colombia for the murder of a human rights activist. Valle was assassinated on Feb. 27, 1998, when he presided the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Antioquia, a post he assumed after the killing of his three predecessors, Héctor Gómez, Luis Vélez Vélez and Carlos Gónima.

Between 1994 and 1998, the attorney had publicly denounced the illegal activities of the "security cooperatives" known as "Convivir"—peasant self-defense groups formed in 1990 to combat the guerrillas, and backed by the governor of Antioquia at the time, current President Alvaro Uribe.

Valle had on several occasions reported joint operations of the military and extreme right-wing paramilitaries in the area of Ituango, scene to civilian massacres for which CIDH found the Colombia state guilty in 2006. Consequentially, Valle was branded "an enemy of the armed forces" and prosecuted for "slander"; he was assassinated by a paramilitary group in his office 24 hours after giving testimony before a Medellín court. (Spero News, Dec. 28 from MISNA)

The Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá (ACCU) killed 19 campesinos in the corregimientos (rural districts) of El Aro and La Granja in Ituango municipality in two incidents between 1996 and 1997. The ACCU paramilitary also burned houses, robbed cattle and dislocated some 1,200 people in these incusrions. In its July 2006 ruling, the CIDH found the Colombian state responsible for failing to protect the victims of the attacks, and ordered it to pay indemnification to 123 survivors. Ituango is one of several self-declared "peace communities" in Colombia which refuse collaboration with any armed faction in the civil war. (Ituango Tierra de Paz blog, July 28, 2006)

http://ww4report.com/node/6597

http://www.semana.com.nyud.net:8090/photos/Generales%5CImgArticulo_T1_51736_2008225_183430.jpg

Jesús María Valle Jaramillo