Abstract
Between 2002 and 2008, several thousand civilians were extrajudicially executed by the Colombian military and police and presented as insurgents or criminals killed in combat to inflate results in the ongoing armed conflict against guerrilla groups. While these cases of so-called false positives were strongly condemned by parts of society, they were simultaneously met with denial by military and state officials. Key actors, such as President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, contested the false positives’ victimhood and claimed the accusations were false. More than a decade after the practice became known, relatively few have been held criminally accountable for these human rights abuses. This thesis aims to find out what has hindered the false positive victims from accessing justice and whether it is connected to the contested nature of their victimhood.
The data for this qualitative case study was collected through fieldwork in Colombia in 2019 and interviews with false positive victims and professionals who work with their cases. The interview data was processed in a thematic data analysis to identify how the false positives` victimhood has been contested and what obstacles they faced in accessing justice in the criminal justice system. The findings were viewed in light of existing literature on access to justice and victimhood.
The empirical findings show how military and government officials, laws, media coverage, and society have contested the victimhood of the false positives by portraying them as legitimately killed insurgents and later as undeserving criminals. The contestation capitalized on the notion of complex victims and their lack of innocence to deny victim recognition. To change their victim status, the false positives must seek a sentence in the Ordinary Criminal Justice System. This thesis identifies three main groups of obstacles that prevent victims from accessing criminal justice: System obstacles, Individual obstacles, and the Military’s cover-up of the crimes. The contestation of the false positives’ victimhood has directly and indirectly hindered justice. The labeling of the deceased as a guerrilla soldier has justified the political deprioritization of their cases and generated stigmatization, which has complicated victims’ access to criminal justice.