The International Criminal Court (ICC) will analyze information regarding the Colombian army murdering civilians and disguising them as guerrillas killed in combat to artificially inflate their enemy kill count.
“We are asking [the government] about this issue, they have responded to us about the cases currently under investigation. We are preparing a report about this, but for now we are in the process of analyzing,” said the court’s outgoing prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, in an interview with Spanish news agency Efe.
Recently the International Federation for Human Rights, an NGO, called on the ICC to open an investigation against Colombian army officials for the so-called “false positive,” or extrajudicial, killings that allegedly occurred between 2002 and 2008, when the scandal broke. Since then more than 2,000 cases of alleged murders committed by army officials with the aim of falsely increasing army success rates against guerrillas have come under investigation.
Ocampo noted that as dictated by the Rome Statute, the agreement that founded the court, the prosecution “does not have to open cases” when the Colombian government investigates them.
The Argentine judge, who led the court for nine years, said that in the case of Colombia the ICC “is an important incentive for judicial action,” given its control over local investigations, whose impunity has been called into question by several human rights organizations.
Ocampo also recognized however that “Colombia is an example of a country that makes the biggest effort in the world” to bring “problems from the past” to trial and offer “reparations to conflict victims.”