Background: the Special Jurisdiction for Peace and Colombia's comprehensive peace system

Background

The Macro-Case 08 decision that drew the UN experts' statement on Ecopetrol came from the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, known by its Spanish abbreviation JEP. The JEP is the court set up to deal with crimes of Colombia's armed conflict, and it groups those crimes into numbered macro-cases rather than trying each incident on its own. The JEP is one part of what the UN calls Colombia's comprehensive peace system, whose other named component is the Unit for the Search for Missing Persons, the body that looks for people who disappeared during the conflict. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for sufficient funding of that system, and the independent experts repeated the call. The JEP works on a restorative model, in which those responsible acknowledge what they did and victims take part in deciding how the harm is to be repaired, rather than punishment alone.