Forget Business- Colombia need Humanitarian Agreement

On Monday the 23th of May, former President of Colombia Alvaro Uribe was lecturing about The three pillars of Colombia’s progress at the London School of Economics. Dr. Uribe introduced the conference under the topic of "social responsibility", which quickly turned into a question and answer session with the audience as attention was drawn to what model Colombia is playing in its region. But in this point they forgot to mention Human Rights that goes hand in hand with Social Responsibility, that cannot be considered as a role model for other Latin American countries.

source: amnesty133.org

The 18th of May, the UK Foreign Office, FCO published its annual report based on the situation of Human Rights in the world, and again Colombia was one of the 20 countries mentioned in this list that each year is being updated. The report begins to state that the general situation of Human Rights in Colombia still is extremely concerning. This might be mainly due to structural problems, which in return limits the full enjoyment of human rights. Main issues in Colombia are exclusion, marginalization, poverty, inequality, land tenure, impunity and lack of access to justice. Government has without doubt done some progress, lately the congress has passed a law to remunerate families affected by the internal war that the country is going through. But still remain much to do before results could be appreciated; the activities of illegal armed groups and drug traffickers continue to have seriously adverse impacts. Lately the demobilized paramilitaries are a hot topic again; the Foreign Office said that an increase of new armed groups supposedly demobilized paramilitaries returned to criminal ways. This should be a point of concern, it could be a sign that the country is falling behind again. Adding to the report another focus should be impunity; even if some progress has been done here impunity remains a serious problem. Let’s hope this new law will be the start of a solution for the victims. Unions that are so important for the UK area highlighted issue for Colombia. The country remains an extremely dangerous place for trade unionist. An example is the latest case of Ecopetrol; violence and intimidation of trade unions across the country remains one of the most serious problems facing the country. The latest figure concerns 28 trade unionists murdered. This shows that even if Colombia is a great country to invest in due to its growth potential there are still many issues to solve that have not been given the needed importance by politicians, media or investors. Huge social actions should take place in the Human Rights field, before Colombia could be considered as a role model for others.