Liliana Uribe, a Colombian human rights lawyer who visited Canada in October, spoke to The Lawyers Weekly about the extreme risks she faces doing her job in her country. Click here to see full sized version.

When Alejandro was eight years old he asked his mom why she was endangering the life of her only child.

Some serious maternal soul-searching ensued. “I did think to myself: ‘Why am I doing this? I shouldn’t be doing this’,” recalls Liliana Uribe. “‘But then I thought ‘no’. And I started to share with him, and include him, and teach him about what we were doing, and why, because there is so much that is so beautiful about this.”

“Beautiful” is not a word usually associated with Uribe’s occupation as a human rights lawyer in Colombia.

Indeed “death-defying” could also describe her vocation in the conflict-riven South American nation where teachers, union leaders, journalists, community activists and other human rights advocates are frequently “disappeared” or murdered by right-wing paramilitary groups.

Yet the soft-spoken 42-year-old lawyer, who fled the country for three months in 2002 in order to evade assassins after she advocated for the family of a death squad victim, is not cynical about the rule of law in a land where tens of thousands of civilians have been illegally executed by state security forces and more than two million people have been driven from their homes.

“I see the law as a very positive instrument that can help those who are most marginalized, who are most vulnerable, who do not have the capacity to defend themselves,” explained Uribe, co-founder of a legal clinic which offers advice, training and organizational assistance to the poor and dispossessed, many who are indigenous farmers, in the Andean province of Antioquia.

Uribe was here last month to urge Canada not to allow its trade interests to overshadow its human rights concerns about the growing number of illegal killings of civilians by Colombian security forces, and the continuing impunity of most of the perpetrators. While in Ottawa she told MPs that Prime Minister Stephen Harper hurt the cause of human rights when he publicly congratulated the Colombian government for its paramilitary demobilization efforts during his official visit last July to launch free trade negotiations.

“It’s a very dangerous message,” Uribe argues. “To say that: ‘You have made advances’ is essentially to say ‘I am supporting you, even though your armed forces are killing civilians,... even though you have paramilitaries who continue to act, and who continue to be infiltrating... the Congress and the government. The sad reality is that the Canadian government at the moment is supporting a government in Colombia that is in fact implementing policies that are violating human rights. The Canadian government is supporting a demobilization process of paramilitaries in Colombia that is not real... because paramilitaries continue to have political, military and economic control in Colombia.”

Uribe said she and her associates (four men and two women) are the only human rights lawyers in Antioquia, a northeastern province of nearly 6 million people, and are among only 15 or so organizations who engage in legal advocacy for the human rights of 43 million Colombians.

But in light of the significant personal risks, and the incremental and uncertain rewards, it isn’t surprising that Colombian lawyers aren’t lining up to specialize in human rights, Uribe acknowledged.

“I have to say that impunity for human rights abuses in Colombia is almost 100 per cent, and the justice system has actually contributed to this impunity rate,” she told The Lawyers Weekly, through a Spanish interpreter, during her Ottawa visit organized by Amnesty International.

Uribe said Colombians’ human rights have actually deteriorated since 1993 when she and eight other University of Medellin law graduates set up the Liberty Legal Corporation in Medellin to fight the mass arbitrary arrests of union leaders and social activists, who faced closed-door trials with secret evidence supplied by anonymous informants. “It was the criminalization of social protest,” remembers Uribe.

But since President Alvaro Uribe (no relation) was elected in 2002, and re-elected by a landslide last year based largely on his pledge to restore peace to Colombia, by force if necessary, a U.N.-endorsed international fact finding mission, including lawyers and forensic experts from the U.K., Spain, France, Germany and the U.S., has documented 955 killings by security forces, including 39 youths between the ages of 15 and 17, as well as 235 forced disappearances up until July of 2007.

The panel’s report, unveiled last month, accused the state’s armed forces of executing civilians, mostly indigenous subsistence farmers, and then passing them off as leftist rebels killed in combat.

However the government contends that it doesn’t countenance human rights abuses by its soldiers, and accuses the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) of trying to discredit the army by passing off the FARC’s fighters as civilians.

But Uribe says “there is enormous pressure that the national government is applying on the army to show positive results in the struggle to end the insurgency, and those who present results, in terms of the greatest number of supposed guerrillas who have been captured or killed, receive incentives, which could be time off [or] promotions. The second enormous problem is that these crimes are never brought to justice; they remain in impunity, because the events are investigated by military judges whose base is in the same battalions where the people who committed the crimes are also based.”

Jurists who have tried to hold the state and paramilitaries to account have paid a high price in recent years. Judges and human rights lawyers have been shot, while government prosecutors who dared to investigate paramilitary abuses have had to flee to other countries, including Canada.

Explained Uribe, “the first challenge that we face, as lawyers who work on human rights, is a permanent environment of intimidation – it’s absolutely continuous. Our phones in the home and in the office, our cell phones, are intercepted. We know that we are followed. And there are unknown people who are always watching our office.”

Still Uribe and her colleagues press on, though it isn’t easy. “My worst fear is that they kill me,” admits Uribe, who also fears she could be jailed on trumped-up charges of abetting FARC or ELN, the two principal left-wing guerilla groups.

Her concerns are shared by Uribe’s parents, a retired accountant and a former government secretary who wonder at their daughter’s commitment.

“My family says: ‘Why don’t you leave this kind of work?’ and... take civil and commercial cases, and less problematic cases? But I feel so strongly that the work that I am doing can really help, really help, people who need that help,” she emphasized. “This is about confronting enormous injustice and it’s about finding ways... by which people can obtain, or stand up for, their rights, and I really think this is the best way to exercise my profession. It’s my vocation.”

Uribe and her colleagues have launched law suits against paramilitary commanders to obtain reparations for human rights abuses. One emblematic case involves the notorious paramilitary leader Ramon Isaza, who has admitted to many murders and is now awaiting sentence in connection with the forced disappearances of 16 subsistence farmers in 1999.

“If it were not for that case, he could demobilize and go into civilian life without ever being brought to justice,” said Uribe.

Uribe urged Canadian lawyers to loudly condemn any upcoming legal proposals that might authorize military judges to continue to determine cases alleging human rights abuses by the army.

Uribe, who can be contacted through Amnesty International or at cjl@une.net.co, said she and her colleagues would also love to “twin” with individual Canadian lawyers who are concerned about the ongoing human rights calamity in Colombia during its fifth decade of civil conflict. “Twinning can provide greater support, particularly at very sensitive moments, complicated moments, when we are receiving threats, and when we are moving forward with very sensitive cases,” Uribe suggested. “To be able to count on support at that time would be very, very helpful.”

Meanwhile Alejandro, now a fourth-year law student with a taste for constitutional law and politics, has come to understand, following many visits into the countryside where he saw his mother’s clients fighting for their dignity and decent lives, that Uribe’s legal battles benefit all Colombians, including her son.

“Because there has to be peace,” she stressed. “I have to contribute my grain of sand toward that goal. I want there to be real truth, and justice, and reparations for the victims of horrendous human rights abuses, and that’s why I and the other members of the corporation are contributing what we have to offer, which is our legal skills, and our experience, and knowledge of how to use the legal system, in order to achieve those changes that are so badly needed.”