Insecurities, Uncertainty, and Human Rights: A Conversation with the Colombian Ombudsman

Status: This talk is in preparation - details may change
Status: This talk has been cancelled

Due to unforeseen urgent changes in the schedule of the Ombudsman, this event has been postponed (new date tbc)

Abstract:

We kindly invite you to the third edition of the Occasional CONPEACE Webinar Series. As part of this series, researchers of the University of Oxford’s programme CONPEACE– From Conflict Actors to Architects of Peace (conpeace.ccw.ox.ac.uk) and international speakers analyse security challenges in Latin America and beyond. They explore differing visions of security, how they can be reconciled, and how security architectures need to be adapted to adequately respond to changing security landscapes from a people-centred security perspective.

In this meeting, we will focus on human rights in Colombia. The country currently struggles with a triple crisis – high levels of insecurity, humanitarian plight related to Venezuelan mass migration, and the COVID-19 public health emergency. 2020 marked the deadliest year for social leaders and human rights defenders in the country since the 2016 Peace Agreement between the government and the FARC guerrillas. Furthermore, Colombia witnessed a major surge of massacres all across the country. In this session, CONPEACE director Dr Annette Idler will discuss current uncertainties, conflict dynamics, and human rights with the Ombudsman of Colombia (Defensor del Pueblo), Dr Carlos Ernesto Camargo Assis.

Speaker bios:

Dr Carlos Ernesto Camargo Assis holds a Master’s degree and a Doctorate in Law from Universidad Sergio Arboleda (Bogotá), where he has taught Public Law for many years. After a career in the public sector, he assumed office as Colombia’s Ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo) on 1 September 2020. Founded in 1992, the Defensoría del Pueblo oversees the promotion and protection of human rights in Colombia.

Dr Annette Idler is the Director of Studies at the Changing Character of War Centre, Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, and at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. She is also Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She is the author of “Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War” (Oxford University Press, 2019).