Series on the rights of the victims and the application of Law 975. Bulletin No 16

1. COMISIÓN COLOMBIANA DE JURISTAS Con el apoyo de:
Organización no gubernamental con status consultivo ante la ONU
Filial de la Comisión Internacional de Juristas (Ginebra) y de la Comisión Andina de Juristas (Lima)
PERSONERÍA JURÍDICA: RESOLUCIÓN 1060, AGOSTO DE 1988 DE LA ALCALDÍA MAYOR DE BOGOTÁ
Gobierno de
Canadá
Bulletin No 16: Series on the rights of the victims and the application of Law 975
Three legislative initiatives on land tenure gravely obstruct
the right to reparation
The government has put before Congress two bills, and given its support to a third, that would
permit the legalization of the lands seized by paramilitary groups and would earmark state
funds for financing productive projects on such lands. These measures imperil the right to
restitution, as a main mechanism of reparation, of the lands illegally seized from millions of
victims of human rights violations, thereby negating the essential principles on which Law 975
supposedly rests.
Many of the lands seized violently through the paramilitary project are today in the hands of
persons exploiting them economically. Through changes in the norms contained in these bills,
the usurpers could consolidate and strengthen the economic benefits they derive from the illegal
seizure by fire of such lands.
One of those bills is the “Rural Development Statute” which, among other aspects, aims to
grant subsidies for the purchase and adaptation of lands and for the formulation and
implementation of agro-industrial projects to those who present high productivity plans. With
this criterion as basis for awarding the subsidies, projects involving large-scale agro-industrial
exploitation backed by large enterprises will be clearly favored.
Some of those projects may have promoted or taken advantage of the systematic seizure of
lands carried out by the paramilitary groups, as stated by the Ombudsman’s Office in its
Resolution No. 39 of June 2, 2005. According to the Ombudsman’s Office, extensive crops of
African palm have been planted on lands seized from entire communities in the Low Atrato
region (Chocó) that had been forced into displacement beforehand by such groups.
In that same resolution, the Ombudsman’s Office established also that the paramilitary groups,
during their incursion into those lands, warned that “the territory belonged to them and that
they would set up their oil palm cultivation there.” This ultimatum was backed by the
paramilitary leader Vicente Castaño, who, days afterward, declared: “In Urabá we have palm
cultivation. I myself got the entrepreneurs to invest in those projects, which are long-lasting
and productive.” 1
*The European Union supported the first phase of this project, between July and December of 2006, during which this
series of information bulletins was begun and the first twelve numbers published, available on the web page. The present
publication has been prepared under the auspices of the Canadian government, and its content is the sole responsibility of
the Colombian Commission of Jurists. In no way should it be thought to reflect the point of view of the European Union
or of the government of Canada.
1
Revista Semana, June 6 2005.
Calle 72 Nº 12-65 piso 7 PBX: (571) 3768200 – (571) 3434710 Fax: (571) 3768230
Email: ccj@coljuristas.org Website: www.coljuristas.org
Bogotá, Colombia

2. Furthermore, the draft Rural Development Statute makes it possible to claim ownership of a
piece of land, even if the claimant has no “just title deed” 2, if ownership is demonstrated
through any other kind of proof (art. 121, No. 2), making it possible to legalize ownership of
properties illegally seized. Article 122 of the same bill established the period of prescription at
five years, even for lands acquired through bad faith. Due to the serious questions raised by the
control organs and social organizations, this article was dropped from the bill.
However, the elimination of article 122 was compensated through another bill, known as
“saneamiento de titulación de propiedad inmueble” (“restructuring the deeds of ownership of
land holdings”). This bill sought to make more flexible the mechanisms for obtaining property
titles by those who lacked a “just title deed” and who had registered the “false transfer.”3 To
that effect, the bill instituted an exceedingly simple procedure that excluded outright the good
faith requirement for the act that gave rise to ownership 4 and established no exceptions for cases
in which the original owners of the property were displaced persons – thereby ignoring the right of
the displaced to the restitution of the goods they were forced to abandon.
The land tenure restructuring bill has undergone considerable modifications. The text approved
on March 13 2007, during the second debate at plenary session of the Senate, limits the
legalization of goods to the demonstration that the “false transfer” is not the product of
“violence, illegal seizure, forced displacement, deceit or the use of front men” (art. 1). And it
requires that the “property not be located in areas declared in imminent danger of
displacement or of forced displacement”5 (art. 7, num. 2), which would prevent the legalization
of goods illegally seized from the displaced population. However, the General Procurator’s
Office has declared that the measures to confiscate and protect the property of the displaced
population, particularly the protection of the rights of the owners, occupants, and holders of the
property,6 are limited in scope and incipient. The existing protective measures being
insufficient, the risk remains that the illegal seizure of landholdings belonging to the displaced
population will be legalized.
Thus, even with the inclusion of measures to limit the onerous consequences of the original bill,
it remains important to be aware of the risks that subsist, such as the possibility that during the
legislative process that lies ahead, the bill will go back to its original form and to the
restrictions of the mechanisms and measures that would protect the properties illegally seized
from the displaced population, as the Procurator’s Office has warned.
The third legislative bill is known by the name of “Assured Agro-Income;” it was presented by
the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, and has already been passed as Law 1133
2
That is, a legally recognized reason whereby a persons aspires to ownership of a good, as for example a contract or a
judicial sentence.
3
Such cases in which the transfer of the property cannot be carried out because, for example, the person who sold it was
not its owner.
4
Possession is the tenure of a given object with the aim of being its master or owner. Colombian Civil Code, art. 762.
5
Declarations that give rise to protective measures that prevent that land properties included in them be transferred or
otherwise disposed of.
6
Procuraduría General de la Nación, Proyecto “Control Preventivo y Seguimiento a las Políticas Públicas en materia de
Reinserción y Desmovilización” (Preventive Control and Monitoring of Public Policies with Respect to Reinsertion and
Demobilization), Seguimiento a la protección de las víctimas del conflicto en materia de bienes patrimoniales.
Descripción, Análisis y Seguimiento, Bogotá, 2006, page. 248.
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3. of 2007. Like the first of the bills mentioned, its purpose is to “entrepreneurize the
countryside” through granting credits attached to the conversion of land use for large-scale
productive projects that respond to the demands of the external market (arts. 2º y 3º).
Thus, the “Assured Agro-Income” program grants economic benefits to some agricultural
sectors while forgetting that in some cases the development of the agro-industrial model has
been implemented through the commission of crimes against humanity – such as forced
displacement, assassination, and enforced disappearance –, infringing once again on the rights
of the victims to the restitution of the lands illegally seized by paramilitary groups. Indeed, the
program does not set up any mechanisms to clarify which of the properties that will be assigned
to the implementation of productive projects have been illegally seized by paramilitary groups.
Under such conditions, the three initiatives mentioned here can lead to the consolidation of the
systematic dispossession of the rural property of the peasant population, using state funding as
a tool under the guise of strengthening agro-industrial exploitation – thus hindering the
restitution of the property to the victims of illegal seizure. Furthermore, the policy that inspires
these three bills is in harmony with the framework designed by the National Development Plan
for 2002-2006 (and reiterated in the National Development Plan for 2007-2010, approved by
Congress on May 3 past), which gives priority to products of the agricultural and livestock
sector considered “essential,” crops that require huge investments and yield belated returns,
such as oil palm, cacao, and rubber, among others.
The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, in its Third Report on the human rights
situation in Colombia in 1999, had already insisted on the close relationship between forced
displacement and land dispossession. For its part, Law 975 has laid out as one of its principles
the victims’ right to reparation (art. 8). In the particular case of the victims of land seizure, this
principle must materialize, in accordance to international parameters, in the restitution of the
goods illegally seized as the main reparation mechanism.
However, Law 975 does not foresee the restitution of the property illegally seized as a
preferential mechanism. On the contrary, it establishes a common fund where the goods
returned by the paramilitary are collected without instruments to acknowledge the individual
and collective rights of the victims of illegal land seizures; rather, it gives preference to
measures for their collective or symbolic reparation.
The United Nations Committee for Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights has recommended
that the Colombian state “solve effectively the problems of poverty and inequity in rural
areas.”7 To that end, it becomes necessary to protect the property of the small farmers, to
guarantee the restitution of lands illegally seized by the paramilitary groups which are being
used for large agro-industrial projects, and to put into effect an authentic agrarian reform as an
indispensable element for overcoming the internal armed conflict. On the contrary, the adoption
of legislative measures that stimulate greater levels of concentration of land ownership, such as
7
United Nations, Economic and Social Council, ECOSOC, Final Observations of the Committee on
Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, 27th period of sessions, Document E/C.12/1/Add.74, December 6, 2001,
Paragraph 23.
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4. the three bills that have been reviewed here, deny the rights of the victims to comprehensive
reparation and make the possibility of justice and peace in the country more remote.
Bogotá, May 11, 2007
For more information, please contact Gustavo Gallón, Director of the CCJ, at Tel. (571) 376 8200, Ext. 115 or 118
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