Thank you.
I am the executive director of CoDevelopment Canada, an international development NGO based in Vancouver that works with communities and organizations in Latin America from a rights-based approach.
I have been in human rights and development work focused on Latin America for more than 25 years. As part of my work with CoDev, I manage the program in Colombia that we've been engaged in since 2001. I have travelled to Colombia on numerous occasions and have met with a large and diverse group of Colombians, including government ministers, local and regional authorities, trade unions, indigenous groups, religious groups, political parties, displaced people, and human rights groups.
My most recent experience there was with the pre-electoral mission that Carleen has just described.
I will focus my presentation today on the human rights situation. You have by now heard or received a great deal of testimony focusing on the Colombian human rights situation. Most everyone, including the Colombian minister of trade, recognizes there is a serious problem. That is where the agreement ends, it seems. Some think the situation is good enough that we ought to enter into a trade deal and hope that the trade deal itself will further propel positive change. Others see the situation as one of profound and systemic human rights violations that will only be exacerbated by a trade deal.
There seem to be a couple of questions central to this discussion, which I think are worth bringing up. How bad does a situation have to be in order for Canada to say we couldn't possibly engage in a trade deal with this country?
The second question, I think, is whether or not a trade agreement is a possible vehicle to improve human rights violations, as some have proposed.
The first question has no clear answer, but it is an important one with which to grapple, I believe. Some members of the committee have stated there is no country in the world, including ours, that does not suffer from human rights violations. This is true, but in speaking about Colombia, this statement becomes so reductionist as to become meaningless.
Colombia leads the world in the number of trade unionists killed and people internally displaced, as you have already heard. The situation of indigenous people is alarming. Last year, in 2009, 114 indigenous people were assassinated, a 63% increase over 2008. Furthermore, 6,201 indigenous people were violently expelled from their ancestral homelands last year as well. Extrajudicial executions continue in unacceptably high numbers. In the region of Cordoba, on the Caribbean coast, where I visited in February, in 2009 alone they had 569 extrajudicial executions, the highest number ever recorded there. Virtually all of these killings—and they included municipal leaders and teachers and campesinos and other leaders—were widely seen to be committed by the paramilitaries.
I could go on. The numbers are staggering and horrific, and each one represents an individual with a family, a community, and friends. It is simply misleading to indicate that Colombia is but one of many countries that has “some problems”.
My work is never far from my mind, but the situation in Colombia was brought closer again last Thursday when I received a request for urgent action from our human rights partner in Colombia, NOMADESC. They, and several other leaders and communities with whom they work, had received another death threat. Those who were threatened included indigenous and Afro-Colombian leaders from the region of northern Cauca, as well as trade union leaders, opposition politicians, and human rights defenders.
Our partner, NOMADESC, has been the target of intimidation and surveillance for many, many months now. Their offices are openly watched; their telephone calls are regularly disrupted; they've recently suffered two robberies, and a near fatal car accident when their car was forced off the road. They see these incidents as part of the intimidation campaign against them.
The communities that NOMADESC works with, and that were also named in the April 8 threat in northern Cauca, are especially vulnerable. A massacre of eight miners there in early April has ratcheted up the tension there even more than the numerous killings before the end of the year did.
This one urgent action is not an isolated case, as you will know from all you have heard here in committee. Human rights violations in Colombia are systematic and more than 95% of the time are left in total and absolute impunity. The situation is unacceptable.
We need to look at who is behind this violence and abuse. The guerrilla armed forces of the FARC and the ELN have their share of responsibility for abuses in the country, including the use of anti-personnel mines and the recruitment of child soldiers. The vast majority of abuses, however, are the work of the paramilitary organizations, which continue to operate throughout Colombia despite an official demobilization process.
The groups of today, sometimes known as the successor groups, or, in Colombia's slang, the recycled paramilitaries, number between 4,000 and 10,000. Despite claims to the contrary by the Colombian government that paramilitaries no longer exist and that the few armed troops that are out there are merely criminal gangs, no credible human rights organization makes this same claim--none. The paramilitary demobilization was a flawed process that did not disband the economic and political structures, which the paramilitary bought up and allowed any who did not demobilize to walk right in and continue acting.
As you've also heard here in the committee, the para-politics scandal has brought to light the vast web of connections and power relationships between elected officials from the ruling party's coalition and the paramilitaries. Recent congressional elections have done little to change that.
Further proof that Colombia is not the country that Canada would like to have as a trading partner is the continuing scandal of the DAS, or the Department of Administrative Security. The DAS is a presidential intelligence body that has been under scrutiny in the past year for illegal activities, including wiretapping of Supreme Court judges, human rights defenders, trade union leaders, and even international human rights bodies such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the UN High Commission on Human Rights.
Their activities did not stop at wiretapping, however. They are also responsible for sending death threats, committing illegal break-ins, stealing computers and other materials from their victims, and passing information about their victims directly to the paramilitary. Information continues to come to light about the depth and breadth of this illegal program, but there's ample evidence that these activities were not the actions of isolated individuals.
Meetings took place in the presidential palace with officials close to the president, including his previous adviser and also his personal secretary. In fact, the president of the Supreme Court in Colombia recently qualified this as “a conspiracy of the state against the court, a criminal action”.
Although the DAS has now been disbanded, there are many outstanding questions about who the intellectual authors of these actions were. If this is not uncovered and tried through court proceedings, it is feared these illegal activities will continue under another name or in a different department.
Can trade agreements help to resolve human rights issues? We don't think that in this case it's possible because we're involved with a government that is complicit in human rights violations through judicial inaction and the direct involvement of its agents. The human rights amendment that has been put forward is not an adequate instrument to address the serious situation, especially because it relies on the Colombian government itself to make reports on itself.
Colombia is a complex country faced with many challenges. As Canadians, before we enter into this territory, the least we can do is to carry out a full and impartial human rights impact assessment, as was agreed to here in this committee two years ago. Such an instrument will give us more information as well as objective measures and indicators with which to make an informed decision and that could form the basis for ongoing monitoring and evaluation should we decide to go ahead with this deal.
Thank you.