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Parliamentary question - E-002506/2014Parliamentary question
E-002506/2014

VP/HR — Military raids in Colombia

Question for written answer E-002506-14
to the Commission (Vice-President/High Representative)
Rule 117
Willy Meyer (GUE/NGL) , Jürgen Klute (GUE/NGL) , Raül Romeva i Rueda (Verts/ALE)

While the government of Juan Manuel Santos continues to hold peace talks in Havana, armed conflict is persisting in Colombia. According to the ACOOC, a Colombian organisation of conscientious objectors to compulsory military service, the National Office for Army Recruitment is recruiting 100 000 young people every year.

While conscientious objection was recognised as a constitutional right by the Constitutional Court in 2009, it seems that this right is being violated on a regular basis, leading to the violation of other rights such as the right to education or work, due to the limitations imposed on people who do not hold a military identity card.

Of particular concern is the practice of military raids highlighted by the ACOOC. During these raids the army arrives in an area and takes young people who do not hold a military ID card to the battalion to forcibly recruit them and send them to rural areas where conflict is severe.

Having studied three cases, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention stated in 2008 that ‘these people were arrested and deprived of their liberty against their will, in order to incorporate them into the army’ and that this ‘deprivation of liberty […] was arbitrary as it was carried out in violation of Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights’.

In 2011, the Constitutional Court declared in Judgment C-879 that citizens ‘can only be held momentarily while their situation is verified and recorded […] this does not involve taking citizens to military barracks or districts or citizens being held by the military authorities for long periods of time in order not only to force them to enlist, but also subjecting them to tests and incorporating them into military service if they pass these tests’.

Has the European External Action Service addressed this issue in a human rights dialogue between the EU and Colombia?

How does it plan to address this issue?

OJ C 324, 18/09/2014