Predicting the Fate of Recommendations Produced by Colombia’s Truth Commission

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Abstract

Colombia’s landmark Commission for the Clarification of Truth, Co-existence and Non-Repetition delivered its Final Report containing its main findings and recommendations in June 2022, with 10 additional volumes being released over the next two months. The recommendations that can be found in the final report as well as in three of the additional volumes reflect the Commission’s own analysis of the causes of the armed conflict, patterns of violence and harms, as well as reviewing recommendations from past truth-seeking and justice processes and input from civil society. A Follow-Up Committee has been established to monitor the implementation of the recommendations as mandated by the 2016 Peace Agreement. The new government has been positive about the work of the Commission in general, stating upon the release of the Final Report that the recommendations will be a key priority for Gustavo Petro’s administration.

Truth commissions represent a new social contract for conflict-affected societies. Their final reports provide information about past violence and oppression and, through their recommendations, a blueprint for remedy and prevention. They are widely believed to be an important means for social and political change, but only recently have the processes surrounding the formulation and implementation of their recommendations attracted concerted attention. This paper applies the lessons of the “Beyond Words” project (Skaar, Wiebelhaus-Brahm, and García-Godos 2022), the first research project to systematically and comparatively identify, typologize and track truth commission recommendations. The resulting “Beyond Words” database, which predates the Colombian commission, provides information on the fate of nearly 1,000 recommendations issued by 13 truth commissions established across 11 Latin American countries between 1983 and 2012. In this paper, we compare the process through which the Colombian recommendations were formulated with previous commissions in the region. Next, we identify similarities and differences in the types of recommendations that were issued by these commissions. Finally, we predict the fate of specific Colombian recommendations based upon the contextual factors and recommendation characteristics that the “Beyond Words” project found to significantly influence the probability of implementation elsewhere.

Authors

• Eric Wiebelhaus-Brahm, University of Arkansas, Little Rock

• Adriana Rudling, Global Research Institute

• Elin Skaar, Chr. Michelsen Institute