Colombia: UN human rights office calls for end to arbitrary detentions

Despite some of the strongest constitutional safeguards in Latin America, arbitrary detentions proliferate in Colombia, according to the United Nations human rights office in the South American country, embroiled in four decades of conflict between leftist guerrillas, Government forces and paramilitary militias.

“The office has noted with concern that illegal or arbitrary detentions constitute, both in number and frequency, one of the most worrying violations of human rights reported in the country,” the director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) office in Colombia, Michael Frühling, said in urging a series of measures to improve the situation.

“Such a state of affairs shatters not only the right to personal freedom and security but also the rights to due process and presumption of innocence,” he added yesterday at the presentation of a report on arbitrary detentions prepared by the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordinator, a non-governmental human rights group.

Mr. Frühling called for the observance of such basic recommendations as ensuring that detentions take place only with a written judicial warrant and when based on actual evidence and not mere suspicion.

“The office is also concerned that mass-scale detentions and individual seizures with no juridical basis frequently affect members of vulnerable groups such as human rights advocates, community leaders, trade union activists and people living in areas where illegal armed groups are active,” he said.

“As is well known, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is firmly convinced that human rights and international humanitarian rights in Colombia can be considerably enhanced if its recommendations are applied, consistently and fully, during 2005,” he added.