Colombia’s Foreign Minister, Jaime Bermudez, on Thursday said the government’s zero-tolerance policy towards human rights violations resulted in a dramatic drop in lawsuits over these violations in 2009.
Bogota released details of its annual report on human rights before the diplomatic corps, who were gathered at the Foreign Ministry.
According to Bermudez, there were only two accusations of extrajudicial executions carried out by members of the armed forces, compared to 400 in 2008.
The Foreign Minister also said that the government is doing everything within its power to stop the illegal wiretapping of govenment critics by state agents.
The Uribe administration found itself in the middle of a number of large-scale human rights scandals, involving the mass murder of civilians to artificially inflate its successes against illegal armed groups, and the illegal wiretapping of journalists, Supreme Court magistrates, opposition politicians and human rights defenders.
