Inter-American court faults Colombia in slaying of lawmaker

[Judi Lynn]

Inter-American court faults Colombia in slaying of lawmaker
By Juan Forero
Saturday, June 26, 2010

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- The verdict this week was a milestone: A distant court affiliated with the Washington-based Organization of American States held the Colombian government responsible for the 1994 assassination of a prominent senator.

Lion of a radical political party whose members were slain by the hundreds, Manuel Cepeda was shot dead in an operation partly organized by Colombia's army. The case is one of hundreds of murders and massacres, old and new, that have entered the inter-American justice system from Colombia, a nation suffering from a simmering, half-century-old guerrilla conflict.

As President ?lvaro Uribe prepares to leave office in August after eight years in power, investigators at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the OAS, are grappling with many of these cases. The most recent have triggered a national and international firestorm over the army's systematic killing of peasant farmers to inflate combat kills and revelations that Uribe's secret police spied on opponents, foreign diplomats and rights groups.

"If you put all of this together, the extrajudicial executions, the espionage of human rights defenders, it's all really a constant over the years," Santiago Canton, an Argentine who has headed the rights commission for nine years, said by phone from Washington. "That's very dangerous."

The backlog of cases and what they say about Colombia's history of rights violations pose a test for Uribe's successor, Juan Manuel Santos, a former defense minister elected Sunday. Among his priorities is winning U.S. congressional approval of a free-trade pact, which would eliminate tariffs on Colombian exports. So far, the effort has stalled because of Democratic concerns about rights being violated with impunity here.

More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/25/AR2010062504573.html