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Date: November 22, 2024 Fri
Time: 11:41 am
Time: 11:41 am
Results for land grabs
1 results foundAuthor: Human Rights Watch Title: The Risk of Returning Home: Violence and Threats against Displaced People Reclaiming Land in Colombia Summary: Violence associated with Colombia's long-running internal armed conflict has driven more than 4.8 million Colombians from their homes, generating the world's largest population of internally displaced persons (IDPs). Colombian IDPs are estimated to have left behind 6 million hectares of land, much of which armed groups, their allies, and others seized, and continue to hold. In June 2011, President Juan Manuel Santos took an unprecedented step towards addressing this problem by securing passage of the Victims Law, which aims to return land to hundreds of thousands of displaced families over the course of a decade. Despite some notable gains in applying the Victims Law, major obstacles stand in the way of its effective implementation. IDPs who have sought to recover land through this new law and other restitution mechanisms have faced widespread abuses tied to their efforts, including killings, new incidents of forced displacement, and death threats. The Risk of Returning Home - based on a year and a half of field research - details those abuses and assesses the government's response. Human Rights Watch found that crimes targeting IDPs for their restitution efforts almost always go unpunished: prosecutors have not charged a single suspect in any of their investigations into threats against land claimants and leaders. Justice authorities also rarely prosecute the people who originally displaced claimants and stole their land. This is a root cause of the current abuses targeting claimants because those most interested in retaining control of the wrongfully acquired land often remain at large and are more readily able to violently thwart restitution. The failure to significantly curb the power of paramilitary successor groups - which have committed many of the abuses against land claimants - also poses a major threat to restitution. To ensure that IDPs can safely return home, Human Rights Watch recommends that prosecutors work with land restitution authorities to vigorously pursue crimes against claimants in the areas where restitution is being implemented. Unless Colombia delivers justice for current and past abuses against land claimants and makes substantial progress in dismantling paramilitary successor groups, the threats and attacks will continue - and the Santos administration's signature human rights initiative could be fundamentally undermined. Details: New York: HRW, 2013. 192p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed October 24, 2016 at: https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/colombia0913webwcover.pdf Year: 2013 Country: Colombia URL: https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/colombia0913webwcover.pdf Shelf Number: 131167 Keywords: Armed ConflictHuman Rights AbusesLand GrabsViolence |