The ethnic chapter of the 2016 Colombian peace agreement and the afro-descendants’ right to prior consultation: a story of unfulfilled promises

ABSTRACT

After more than 50 years of conflict, the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) signed the 24th of November 2016 a final peace agreement. It included an ‘Ethnic Chapter’ that states that the agreement must be interpreted and implemented with an ethnic-based approach. This has significant implications on the relations between ethnic groups and the State in the six components of the agreement, including the right to be consulted before any implementation measure is enacted. In particular, the peace agreement opened up new understandings of prior consultation for the transitional period that favoured afro-descendants and indigenous peoples. For instance, the Ethnic Chapter incorporated the concept of cultural objection (objeción cultural), which changed the deontic content of the right to prior consultation by recognising a form of veto with respect to implementation decisions of the peace agreement, not only at the level of local administrative measures, but also at the national level of legislative measures. However, very little progress has been made in this regard. The paper aims to critically analyse the Ethnic Chapter’s first year of implementation (2017), focusing on the right to prior consultation for afro-descendants.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace agreement
• afro-descendants
• ILO Convention N° 169
• prior consultation
• cultural objection
• veto right

Acknowledgements

An early version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Law & Society Association, held in Toronto on 7–10 June 2018. The author is grateful to Jessika Eichler, Mark Goodale, and Annette Mehlhorn for valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Manuel Góngora-Mera is a postdoctoral lecturer at Lateinamerika Institut (Freie Universität Berlin). He received his doctoral degree in Public Law (summa cum laude) from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2010). He was visiting researcher at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (San José, 2008), UNRISD (Geneva, 2011), FLACSO (Quito, 2013), and Universidad de Salamanca (Salamanca, 2016). His publications deal mainly with constitutional and human rights issues, including international human rights law, social rights, racial discrimination, and social inequalities.

ORCID

Manuel Góngora-Mera http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2017-7028

Notes

1 William Villa and Juan Houghton, Violencia política contra los pueblos indígenas de Colombia, 1974–2004 (Bogotá: CECOIN/OIA/IWGIA, 2004).

2 Margarita Chaves, comp., La multiculturalidad estatalizada: indígenas, afrodescendientes y configuraciones de Estado (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2011), 67–102.

3 César Rodríguez, Tatiana Alfonso Sierra, and Isabel Cavelier Adarve, El desplazamiento afro: tierra, violencia y derechos de las comunidades negras en Colombia (Bogotá: Uniandes, 2009), 8–10, 101–2.

4 Auto 004/2009 of the Constitutional Court of Colombia.

5 ‘Desangre de líderes’, Verdad Abierta, 30 January 2017, https://verdadabierta.com/asesinato-lideres/ (accessed March 23, 2018).

6 Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Censo socioeconómico UN-CNR. Caracterización comunidad FARC-EP – Resultados Generales (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2017). http://www.reintegracion.gov.co/es/sala-de-prensa/SiteAssets/Presentaci%C3%B3n%20rueda%20de%20prensa%20Julio%206%202017.pdf (accessed May 21, 2018).

7 John-Andrew McNeish, ‘Extracting Justice? Colombia’s Commitments to Mining and Energy as a Foundation for Peace’, The International Journal of Human Rights 21, no. 4 (2016): 500–16.

8 Most of these lands are in the Amazon rainforest, the Orinoquia savanna, and the Guajira desert.

9 Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia, ‘Pueblos indígenas en riesgo de exterminio físico y cultural: Caso Colombia – Intervención en el 147 período de sesiones de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos’, Washington, 14 March 2013, http://www.democraciaycooperacion.net/IMG/pdf/Pueblos_Indigenas_en_riesgo_de_exterminio-ONIC-_AUDIENCIA_14_DE_MARZO_WASHIGTON_Copy.pdf (accessed February 10, 2018).

10 Luis Jorge Garay Salamanca, Minería en Colombia: Derechos, políticas públicas y gobernanza (Bogotá: Contraloría General de la Nación, 2013), 63.

11 Rodríguez, Sierra, and Cavelier, El desplazamiento afro, 9.

12 Fergus MacKay, A Guide to Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in the International Labour Organization (Moreton-in-Marsh: Forest Peoples Programme, 2010), 10–13.

13 Red Nacional de Agricultura Familiar, ‘Encuentro Nacional de Organizaciones y Comunidades sobre los PDETS’, 6 December 2017, http://agriculturafamiliar.co/encuentro-nacional-de-organizaciones-y-comunidades-sobre-los-pdets/ (accessed April 28, 2018).

14 Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (London: Pluto Press, 2010), 80.

15 Luis Carlos Castillo Gómez, Etnicidad y Nación: El desafío de la diversidad en Colombia (Cali: Universidad del Valle, 2007); Zulia Mena, ‘Testimonio’, in El despertar de las comunidades afrocolombianas: Relatos de cinco líderes, ed. María Inés Martínez (San Juan: Centro de Investigaciones Sociales de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2012), 259–302.

16 Jaime Arocha, ‘Ley 70 de 1993: Utopía para afrodescendientes excluidos’, in Utopía para los excluidos: El multiculturalismo en África y América Latina, comp. Jaime Arocha (Bogotá: Centro de Estudios Sociales de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2004), 159–178.

17 Daniel Bonilla, ‘Self-Government and Cultural Identity: The Colombian Constitutional Court and the Right of Cultural Minorities to Prior Consultation’, in Constitutionalism of the Global South: The Activist Tribunals of India, South Africa, and Colombia, ed. Daniel Bonilla (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), 273–4.

18 Juan Herrera, ‘The Right of Cultural Minorities to Binding Consent: Case Study of Judicial Dialogue in the Framework of a Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina’, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law (MPIL) Research Paper no. 2017-11: 17–19.

19 Jason Tockman, ‘Eliding Consent in Extractivist States: Bolivia, Canada, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’, The International Journal of Human Rights 22, no. 3 (2018): 325–49.

20 Laetitia Braconnier Moreno, ‘Los derechos propios de los pueblos étnicos en el Acuerdo de Paz de agosto de 2016’, Revista Derecho del Estado 40 (2018): 110–1.

21 Roddy Brett, La voz de las víctimas en la negociación: Sistematización de una experiencia (Bogotá: PNUD Colombia, 2017).

22 Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia, ‘Comunicado de Prensa 003: Propuesta de Capítulo Étnico de la Comisión Étnica para la Paz y la Defensa de los Derechos Territoriales a la Mesa de Conversaciones de Paz de La Habana’, 11 August 2016, http://www.onic.org.co/comunicados-onic/1386-propuesta-de-capitulo-etnico-de-la-comision-etnicapara-la-paz-y-la-defensa-de-los-derechos-territoriales-a-la-mesa-de-conversaciones (accessed April 17, 2018).

23 Aiden Salgado Cassiani, ‘¿Qué hay detrás del capítulo étnico?’, Colombia Plural, 20 March 2017, https://colombiaplural.com/detras-del-capitulo-etnico/ (accessed April 17, 2018).

24 Jaime Arocha, ‘Comisión étnica para la paz’, El Espectador, 14 March 2016, https://www.elespectador.com/opinion/opinion/comision-etnica-para-la-paz-columna-622131 (accessed March 11, 2018).

25 Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network, ‘ACSN Celebrates Inclusion of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous Rights in Final Colombia Peace Accord’, 26 August 2016, https://afrocolombian.org/2016/08/29/acsn-celebrates-inclusion-of-afro-colombian-and-indigenous-rights-in-final-colombia-peace-accord/ (accessed April 18, 2018).

26 On the notion of gender mainstreaming, see: Report of the UN Economic and Social Council for 1997. UN Doc. A/52/3. September 18, 1997.

27 See Lorenzo Muelas Hurtado, ‘Del derecho indígena. Introducción a la Propuesta indígena de reforma constitucional’, in Documentos para la historia del movimiento indígena colombiano contemporáneo, comp. Enrique Sánchez Gutiérrez and Hernán Molina Echeverri (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2010 [1991]), 303.

28 Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network, ‘ACSN Celebrates Inclusion’.

29 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, IV Report on the Human Rights Situation in Colombia 2017 (Washington D.C.: IACHR, 2018), chapter V, para. 240.

30 Coordinación Étnica Nacional de Paz, Informe sobre sesión de Instancia Especial de Alto Nivel con Pueblos Étnicos y delegados de la CSIVI (Bogotá: CENPAZ, 2017), http://www.conpicolombia.org/2017/05/informe-sobre-sesion-de-instancia.html (accessed March 25, 2018).

31 Álvaro Francisco Amaya-Villarreal and Valeria Guzmán-Duarte, ‘La naturaleza jurídico-internacional de los acuerdos de paz y sus consecuencias en la implementación’, Revista Colombiana de Derecho Internacional 30 (2017): 41–60; Édgar Hernán Fuentes Contreras, ‘Sistema de fuentes colombiano e implementación del Acuerdo de Paz’, Derechos en Acción 5 (2018): 91–126.

32 However, the guarantee of protection until 2030 can be also shortened or even derogated by any future government through constitutional amendment or a public referendum.

33 Sabrina Ragone, ‘The Colombian Constitutional Court and the Peace Process: Slowing down the “Fast-Track”?’ Federalismi.it – Rivista di Diritto Pubblico Italiano, Comparato, Europeo 3 (2017): 1–16.

34 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, IV Report, para. 201–203, 249.

35 This and the other quotations in this paragraph are all from de Greiff, Pablo, ‘Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, regarding national consultations concerning the design and implementation of transitional justice measures’, UN Document, A/71/40827, 24 October 2016, para. 5–6.