To protect human rights is never an easy task, whatever country in which this work is undertaken. Nevertheless, in some countries, this is more difficult and this work put heavy risks on the people who have decided to defend the innocents and to ask the ruling powers to respect the rights of the people.
Father Javier Giraldo, a Colombian Jesuit, is one of those individuals for whom the struggle for the respect of human rights has a clear priority over his personal safety. He founded the Comisión Intercongregacional de Justicia y Paz in 1988 and, for many years, has been promoting rights and fighting against impunity for those guilty of human rights violations. In order to recognize this extraordinary work, the 1997 John Humphrey Freedom Award of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development was granted to the Comision Intercongregacional de Justicia y Paz (Inter-congregational Committee for Justice and Peace) and Father Javier Giraldo of Colombia.
Father Giraldo has accepted the Centre's invitation and will be in Canada in October to be honoured at an award ceremony and to promote increased awareness among Canadians of the serious situation in Colombia where violence and human rights violations are rampant.
This Latin America country has been the scene of a continual political and criminal violence for many years. It is estimated that Colombia has the world's highest rate of political assassinations in proportion to its population. From 1988 to the present, an average of ten people every day have been killed due to political violence. This country of 39 million people is also known for the large influence of the drug cartels.>P? This award, besides the recognition it gives to the work of Father Giraldo and the Comisión, also support the work of all human rights defenders in Colombia, while violence against them is on the rise. Despite death threats, Father Giraldo has refused to accept armed body guards proposed by the State. He wants to be totally free of his movements while avoiding that government services use the intelligence they will then collect against the people he is meeting.
Father Giraldo is well known for the work he did to force Colombia to accept its responsibility for the killing of more than 100 inhabitants of Trujillo by soldiers, police officers and drug traffickers, between 1988 and 1990. The case was put forward the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States. The Commission concluded that the Colombian state was responsible. Colombia's President, Ernesto Samper, has accepted total responsibility for the Trujillo massacre, a first for this troubled nation. However, Father Giraldo will come back before the OAS, because President Samper did not fulfill his commitments: he did not initiated pursuit against the authors, compensated the victims or changed the legislation to avoid such a tragedy to occur again.
Every year, the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development grants the John Humphrey Freedom Award to acknowledge the exceptional contribution of a non-governmental organization (NGO) or individual in the field of human rights and democratic development. The award was created in honour of John Peters Humphrey, the Canadian who drafted the first proposal for a universal declaration of human rights. Previous John Humphrey Award winners are lawyer and women's rights activist Sultana Kamal of Bangladesh (1996), Bishop Carlos F. X. Belo of Dili, East Timor (1995), the Campaign for Democracy and the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (1994), the Plate-forme des organismes haďtiens de défense des droits humains (1993) and the Instituto de Defensa Legal of Peru (1992).
Jury of the John Humphrey Freedom Award was comprised of: Reed Brody, former Director of the International Human Rights Law Group; Adama Dieng, General Secretary of the International Commission of Jurists; Daisy Francis, Co-Director of the Canada-Asia Working Group, a Canadian inter-Church coalition which work for the protection of human rights in Asia; Irwin Cotler, law teacher at McGill University and a member of the ICHRDD Board of Directors; and Laurie Wiseberg, Executive Director and co-founder of Human Rights Internet, an international database on human rights. A total of 79 nominations from 50 countries were received.
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democratique International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic
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