Bogotá.- A group of 26 former leaders from 13 Ibero-American countries, including the Dominican
Hipólito Mejía, asked the UN and the
Organization of American States (OAS) to address the “serious violations” against the human rights of former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who will learn this Friday the sentence he must serve for the crimes of procedural fraud and bribery in criminal proceedings.
This was stated by members of the
Democratic Initiative of Spain and the Americas (Idea Group) in a letter to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, the Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers of the United Nations, Margaret Satterthwaite, the Secretary General of the OAS, Albert Randim, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
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«We come before you so that (…) you assume the historic responsibility of safeguarding the constitutional and legal State in Colombia», they expressed.
In the opinion of the former presidents, the criminal proceedings against Uribe have been “plagued with anomalies, which have now resulted in a first instance judicial conviction”.
“The anomalies of this process constitute systematic violations of their rights protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the American Convention on Human Rights,” they added.
The letter was signed by former Spanish government presidents Jose Maria Aznar and Mariano Rajoy, and by former presidents of Argentina Mauricio Macri; of Bolivia Carlos Mesa and Jorge Quiroga; of Chile Eduardo Frei; of Colombia Ivan Duque; of Costa Rica Oscar Arias, Rafael Angel Calderon and Miguel Angel Rodriguez; of Ecuador Jamil Mahuad and Lenin Moreno; of El Salvador Alfredo Cristiani, and of Mexico Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon.
It was also signed by former presidents of Panama Nicolás Ardito, Mireya Moscoso and Ernesto Pérez; of Paraguay Mario Abdo Benítez, Federico Franco and Juan Carlos Wasmosy; of the Dominican Republic Hipólito Mejía; and of Uruguay Luis Alberto Lacalle and Julio María Sanguinetti, as well as Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó and former governor of Puerto Rico Luis Fortuño.
Uribe, 73 years old and head of the right-wing Democratic Center party, became on Monday the first Colombian former president criminally convicted, after being found responsible, in the first instance, of the crimes of bribery in criminal proceedings and procedural fraud.
The accredited victims in the case against the former president, led by the left-wing senator Iván Cepeda, alerted the UN and the IACHR of the “external pressures”, specifically from the U.S., on the country’s judiciary.
This afternoon, the judge in charge of the case against the former president, Sandra Heredia, is expected to announce the sentence Uribe will have to serve, which could range from four to eight years in prison, likely under house arrest.
