¿Sabes qué pasó? Weekly Newsletter November 6-12.
Álvaro Uribe, former president of Colombia, is denounced before Argentine courts
The former president has been denounced for war crimes and crimes against humanity before the Argentine federal courts, based on the principle of Universal Jurisdiction.
The lawsuit has been filed by relatives of victims of the “false positives”, the nickname given to the practice by which thousands of civilians were killed in Colombia by the military forces and presented as combat casualties in the context of the war on terrorism (the investigation of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace has documented 6,402 victims).
The complaint provides an exhaustive account of the policies developed by the Uribe administration that allowed, encouraged and even authorized these state crimes. In order to incriminate the former president, a fundamental point of the complaint is the demonstration that Uribe was aware of these practices, having been informed by human rights organizations, and that these criticisms were ignored. In addition, testimonies are mentioned that show how he not only abstained from taking measures to put an end to these practices, but even pressured and directly ordered these crimes to be committed.
Puedes leer la noticia completa aquí.
Second case in Switzerland of trial for crimes against humanity
Osuman Sonko, former Gambian Minister of the Interior, will be tried at the Federal Criminal Court in Bellinzona on January 8, 2024. This process involves the prosecution under the principle of universal jurisdiction of the highest-ranking state official in Europe.
The accused was arrested in Bern on January 26, 2017, following which a more than six-year investigation was opened, culminating in the filing of charges by the Swiss Attorney General’s Office for his alleged involvement in acts of torture, kidnapping, sexual violence and murder.
Osuman Sonko was a senior member of the dictatorship of Yahya Jammeh, who after staging a coup ruled The Gambia for more than 20 years at the helm of an iron-fisted system of terror and was removed from power in 2017. Following this, the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparation Commission was created to investigate the numerous cases of human rights violations perpetrated during the dictatorship, for which daily hearings have been held and broadcast on the country’s public television.
You can read the full story here.
The need to create the Fund for Loss and Damage due to climate change effects
Although in the COP27 climate summit agreement was reached to design a global fund to address the damage caused by climate change, but shortly before a new summit a year later, no concrete agreement has been reached on how this fund will be financed and managed.
This fund would aim to support mainly the most vulnerable developing countries with respect to the effects of climate change for the management and compensation of damages caused by natural disasters such as droughts or floods.
The creation of this fund is a moral obligation for the international community, because of the large imbalance between developed and developing countries in terms of contribution to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions, the damage suffered from the adverse phenomena it causes, and the capacity to deal with them. Therefore, in order to address this climate injustice under the principle of responsibility and solidarity, it is essential that the richest countries make the largest financial contributions and that the operation of the fund does not lead to increased indebtedness for developing countries.
Puedes leer la noticia completa aquí.
