Setting the stage for justice: an agency centered approach to access to justice for corporate complicity with past atrocities. Colombia 1970-2014

• In Event: Power politics and inequality in Colombia: the use of transitional justice mechanisms to bring economic actors to account for their role in past atrocities

Abstract

The questions of business involvement in human rights violations in countries facing civil conflict, as well as access to remedy and accountability for these violations have generated a considerable amount of attention from academia and practitioners. Most theoretical efforts on access to remedy have focused on identifying the obstacles, but these do not explain the unlikely case of Colombia. This article presents a theory developed in a larger research project that presents an alternative explanation for the Colombian case, as well as some of the findings from that larger project where I used a mixed methods approach to examine why the country has positioned itself as a leader in the world in terms of judicial actions and convictions of economic actors for their complicity with grave human rights violations committed during the internal armed conflict. My analysis presents an agency centred framework to suggest that while an increase in the power of the people is necessary to secure judicialisation and remedy, these results are only possible when they face an economic actor with reduced veto power.

Author

• Laura Bernal Bermúdez, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana