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Abstract
Victims or Villains? – the
legal defense of the Colombia Three
West,
Katharine Hazel (Universidad Javeriana, Colombia)
Now that the dust has settled in a
definitive manner in the case of the three Irish men tried
and, later, convicted for training FARC members in IRA
techniques. The case has passed through three instancias in
the Colombian judicial system with the final sentencia being
issued by the Corte Suprema de Justicia in 2007. Originally
convicted of travelling on false passports, they were
acquitted of the greater crime of training for illegal
activities in the Juzgado Primero Penal del Circuito
Especializado in Bogotá, the Fiscalia (the Colombian
prosecution service) appealed and they were later convicted
in the Tribunal Suprema in Bogotá. Their lawyers appealed to
the Corte Suprema de Justicia for the casación of this
conviction. (Casación is a method of annulling a judicial
sentence in cases where the law has been incorrectly
interpreted or applied or the sentence itself has been
issued in a procedure which has not complied with the legal
solemnities). This sentence was issued on March 21 in 2007
rejecting their arguments and placing an almost definitive
end to the whole affair – at the very least in the Colombian
courts. My proposal is to analyze the legal defence the
men’s lawyers presented and place it in a Colombian legal
and political context, which includes the Parapolitica
scandal and the beginning of the application of the
controversial Ley de Justicia y Paz (originally designed in
an environment of offering transitional justice to the
illegal right-wing paramilitary groups) to FARC deserters.
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