IMPUNITY/COLOMBIA

WHEREAS in this half year the Prosecutors’ Office of the Nation and judges have made important decision in the fight against impunity, among them the following: the indictment against the presumed instigators of the murder of Jaime Rengifo; the measure to assure that José Miguel Narváez will not receive the benefit of release from prison, Narváez being the former sub-director of the DAS, as the presumed instigator of the murder of journalist and humorist Jaime Garzón; the designation as a crime against humanity of the murder of the former director of El Espectador, Guillermo Cano Isaza, in order to keep the case from falling under the statute of limitations; the decision by the Director of Prosecutors to fulfill the request to locate, review, and activate 27 crimes against journalists located in distant parts of the country, and linking through interrogatories of Ferney Tapasco González and his son, Dixon TapascoTriviñoto the murder of the assistant director of the newspaper La Patria, Orlando Sierra Hernández, as presumed instigators WHEREAS in March, 1997, journalist Gerardo Bedoya Borrero, opinion editor of the El País newspaper, was murdered, with no progress to date in the investigation that would lead to those responsible for this crime; WHEREAS the fourth principle of the Declaration of Chapultepec states: “Freedom of expression and of the press are severely limited by murder, terrorism, kidnapping, intimidation, the unjust imprisonment of journalists, the destruction of facilities, violence of any kind and impunity for perpetrators. Such acts must be investigated promptly and punished harshly.” THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE IAPA RESOLVES to highlight the work carried out by prosecutors in the cases of Jaime Rengifo, Jaime Garzón, Orlando Sierra, Mario Prada Díaz, and the 14 cases in which they have made decisions that will allow pursuit of the investigations to permit identification and punishment of the murderers of these journalists; to exhort the General Prosecutors’ Office of Colombia to take necessary steps to move along the judicial process underway in the case of the murder of Gerardo Bedoya in order to find the perpetrators and instigators of this crime.