Colombia’s new government wants to slash funding for the transitional justice court, known as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP). The JEP was created in the 2016 peace agreement to provide a different form of justice that would guarantee truth and reparation, while also helping ensure non-repetition of violence. However, the far right considers it too lenient on former guerrillas and wants to redirect funding into the normal criminal justice system. The proposal has raised concerns over the JEP’s future, as it continues to investigate and sanction human rights abuses committed during the armed conflict.
On 17 September, Senator Enrique Gómez moved to cut $100 billion pesos (around £24 million) from the JEP budget. Gómez belongs to the National Salvation Party, which supported far-right president Abelardo De la Espriella’s election campaign. The government will now seek support among its allies in congress – the traditional Conservatives and Liberals, as well as other centre-right and right-wing parties such as the U and Radical Change – to get the motion approved.
The proposed cut comes despite JEP officials having requested extra funding for the court to fulfil its functions, which, alongside the Truth Commission and the Search Unit for Disappeared Persons (UBPD), is one of the three institutions of the transitional justice system.
The JEP is a longstanding target of Colombia’s far right. In 2019, the government of Iván Duque tried to modify the peace agreement to weaken the JEP’s jurisdiction over military officials and third parties. This was eventually rejected by Congress. Former president Álvaro Uribe, a major critic of the JEP, has supported the proposal to cut funding. On X, he accused the JEP of ‘mistreating military personnel, pressuring officials from the Antioquia Governor’s Office, and frantically seeking witnesses against me.’ Uribe is under investigation by a separate court over alleged involvement in massacres of civilians in the 1990s, with many observers suspecting his opposition to the JEP is based in self-preservation in ensuring the truth around the armed conflict remains hidden.
Congress member María Fernanda Carrascal of the progressive Historic Pact – former president Gustavo Petro’s party – posted ‘the far right – both in power and in Congress – seeks to starve the JEP of funds to the point of preventing it from functioning. And why? Because they are doing the bidding of those who, without formally belonging to an illegal armed group or security forces, participated in the conflict by financing or supporting paramilitarism.’
In September 2025, the JEP issued its first ‘restorative sentences’ to former FARC leaders over hostage taking (in an investigation known as Case One) and then on former military officials over extrajudicial murders of civilians presented as guerrillas killed in combat (Case Three). The reduced sentences allow those who admit guilt to carry out sanctions that can benefit peace and support victims’ rights. Currently, senior FARC members are electronically tagged and are participating in the search for victims of forced disappearance and the exhumation of bodies. Earlier this month, the JEP charged a group of former military and police officials with colluding with paramilitaries to commit murders and human rights abuses against trade unionists and other civilians
This is not enough for the far right, many of whom consider, like president De la Espriella, that the court’s sentences are a form of ‘impunity’. However, these allegations are forcefully rejected by most other groups, including the JEP, the victims and the leaders of the former FARC. In a statement backing the JEP on 21 September, the sanctioned former FARC leaders reiterated their ‘commitment to truth, reparation and peace in Colombia’, acknowledging that words alone are not enough to repair the hurt caused. In reference to their sentences the statement said ‘this is not a procedure. It is an exercise of responsibility and commitment, of deep listening and reparation that we have to take responsibility for.’
Meanwhile, victims’ organisations recently stated ‘the JEP has enabled significant progress towards the clarification of serious human rights violations and infractions of international humanitarian law, as well as the recognition of responsibilities that in many cases had been decades without clarity. It is exactly the relevance of these advances that makes it indispensable to ensure the necessary conditions for the fulfilment of its mandate.’
The Colombian Commission of Jurists has stated that the cuts would plunge the JEP and the UBPD into ‘operational paralysis that would restrict its actions,’ asking politicians to reject the cuts. Victims’ organisations argue the cuts would have ‘direct consequences upon victims and their chance to participate in and have access to transitional justice.’
Alongside De la Espriella’s criticisms of the JEP, his ordering of renewed military operations, his security deal on US joint operations in Colombia and the closure of previous peace talks created by the Petro government, the cuts to the JEP are being seen as evidence of, at best, a lack of commitment to the 2016 Peace Agreement or, at worst, part of an effort to sabotage it.