Item 6: Adoption of Colombia's UPR Outcome

Organisation: Christian Solidarity Worldwide

Thank you Mr President,

CSW welcomes Colombia’s co-operation with the UPR process.

While we support the many recommendations Colombia received relating to the full and effective implementation of the country's 2016 peace agreement, we are disappointed that no Member State highlighted the continued need to combat violence related to freedom of religion or belief.

Illegal armed and criminal groups continue to hold significant influence or control in parts of the country.

These groups often view the presence of a strong or growing religious community as a threat to their authority, and as such religious leaders or often targeted as part of a strategy used to bring entire communities under control.

In some cases, religious leaders have been forced to provide shelter to members of illegal armed groups in the leaders’ homes. Illegal armed groups also regularly extort churches, religious leaders and their families.

Religious leaders who refuse to comply with such demands, and those who advocate for human rights, often face threats and violent attacks. CSW recorded the killing of at least seven Protestant Christian pastors and social leaders during the reporting period.[1]

Despite such cases, and attacks on communities of faith and their leaders throughout the course of Colombia’s decades-long internal conflict, the religious sector was excluded from the 2011 Law of Victims as a specific category of the population that was collectively victimised.

CSW therefore calls on Colombia not only to ensure the full implementation of the 2016 peace agreement, but to strive for guarantees to ensure real protections of the right to freedom of religion or belief and for a lasting peace that meets the needs of truth, justice and reparation for all victims.

This must entail the amendment of the Law of Victims to include the religious sector, and detailed investigations into all violations of the right to freedom of religion or belief perpetrated throughout the course of the country’s internal conflict and up to the present day.

Thank you