Human rights violations committed by the military that have been heard by a military court should be reopened in a people’s court, Colombia’s Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.
The ruling came after the court examined a case when two civilians were killed in 1985, after military forces responded to an attack by the guerrilla group M-19 on a milk truck.
The ruling may affect cases of “false positives,” in which some members of the military were found to have killed civilians and presented the bodies as FARC combatants killed in action.
In one prominent “false positives” incident, concerning Colombian soldiers accused of killing eleven men from Bogota‘s Soacha slum, nearly all of the defendants were released from custody due to a legal technicality.
Prosecutors in the Soacha case have been trying to move the trial from the military to the civilian courts.