COLOMBIA: Europe Presses for Justice in Wiretapping Case

• by Constanza Vieira (bogotÁ)
• Monday, July 18, 2011
• Inter Press Service

The DAS — Administrative Department of Security — answers directly to the office of the president. However, Uribe (2000-2010) claims that he was unaware of the wiretapping carried out by the agency, which came to light in early 2009.

Documents seized from the DAS in February 2009 provide evidence of secret operations dubbed 'Europa' and 'Transmilenio', which included spying carried out in Europe and on European citizens.

'What we now understand is that this system was invented and functioned under the direction of the office of the president,' Durant said in a Jul. 15 press conference in Bogotá at the end of a visit to Colombia.

'For now, we are demanding information. Later we will see what steps to take,' she responded to a question from IPS.

The scandal over illegal spying by the DAS, which involved wiretapping, following and threatening journalists, opposition politicians, human rights defenders and even Supreme Court justices, broke out in 2009 and led to the resignation of the agency's director, Pilar Hurtado, and investigations of the last four directors as well as 30 DAS agents.

Durant, a member of the Group of the Greens in the European Parliament, visited this country for four days at the invitation of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

Her busy agenda included meetings with Colombian Vice President Angelino Garzón, the president of the Supreme Court, Camilo Humberto Tarquino, and representatives of the attorney general's office, the office of the public prosecutor, the foreign ministry and the DAS itself.

On Friday Jul. 15 she also met with delegates of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights office in Colombia

She then talked to several victims of DAS's espionage and their defenders, members of the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers' Collective (CAJAR), who also became targets of the domestic intelligence agency.

'All of the people I met with report that the DAS acted illegally,' Durant said.

'It was not just a question of threats and wiretapping, but also the fact that the illegally gathered information was used in an unacceptable manner to influence the political agenda,' she added.

'The Supreme Court was spied on, which to me is shocking,' she said. 'It is clear that the wiretapping began when the Court started to investigate the links between members of Congress and the paramilitaries.'

One-third of the members of Congress were investigated or prosecuted for links to the far-right paramilitary militias, after the so-called 'para-politics' scandal first broke in 2006.

Durant expressed concern that former DAS agents who have spoken out 'feel they are in danger and know that if they tell everything they know, their families will suffer.' She called for improved security for them as well as for the victims of DAS's wiretapping and their lawyers.

One aim of the Belgian lawmaker's trip was 'to apply political pressure' to get authorities in Colombia to bring to justice those responsible for the wiretapping 'and to give the justice system time to act,' she said.

She stated that she was pleased to find 'political will' in the attorney general's office 'to get to the bottom of this case. But resources are needed to strengthen the judicial system,' at both the administrative and law enforcement levels, she added.

If the Colombian government of Juan Manuel Santos wants 'to make the DAS case a test of credibility, it must provide the prosecutors with all possible resources,' Durant said.

'I have found people who are truly dedicated and determined to get to the bottom of the investigation,' she added. But she asked 'why a specific judicial commission has not been set up' to investigate the DAS wiretapping case.

'The case is moving forward at both the administrative and criminal justice levels,' she said. But she stressed that 'there is still a ways to go, and there are problems,' such as the fact that former DAS director Pilar Hurtado was granted political asylum in Panama, at former president Uribe's behest.

'There are also others who do not want to talk,' Durant said.

In May, the chairperson of the European Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee urged authorities in Colombia to clarify and explain DAS's spying activities in Europe and Colombia, and determine who was responsible for them.

'There are dozens of European victims. There is a case open in Belgium, and another in Spain, and there are demands from the justice systems in those countries that have not yet received a response from the authorities in Colombia,' Luis Guillermo Pérez, secretary general of FIDH and a lawyer with CAJAR, told IPS.

'We believe, in good faith, that this is due to internal bureaucratic problems and not to any interest in standing in the way of cooperation,' he said.

Durant 'is concerned that, given the magnitude and severity of the case, the State has not made a bigger effort to single out and punish the top people who were responsible, and to keep, for example, people like Hurtado from fleeing the country,' Pérez added.

More than 35 people are currently under investigation in the DAS spying scandal, several of whom are in prison.

Uribe is also under investigation in relation to the case, by the Accusations Commission in the lower house of Congress, which has the authority to investigate heads of state and former heads of state. However, the investigation is moving painfully slowly.

CAJAR is critical of the Commission: its investigations, according to Pérez, 'are politically-motivated action aimed at keeping the truth from coming out, more than legal action.'

Pérez said the investigation was undermined by procedural flaws and a lack of will on the part of the Commission to allow the victims into the hall where the first hearing against Uribe was held in mid-June, and by continuing attacks by the former president against CAJAR, the latest vía his Twitter account on Jul. 8.

The human rights group has brought legal charges against the members of the Commission before the Supreme Court, and has continued to press for the victims to be allowed to ask Uribe questions during the hearings.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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