ENGLISH REPORT

ISAAHRD
Information System on Attacks Against Human Rights Defenders in Colombia

ANNUAL REPORT

2024
ISAAHRD
Information System on Attacks Against Human Rights Defenders in Colombia

In Colombia, the registry of attacks against defenders has enabled us to identify patterns, increases or decreases in this selective violence in different periods of time. Numerous sectors of civil society have made efforts to ensure that this information exists and that we avoid, for example, reducing our complex territorial realities to a number. Aggressions against human rights defenders, we reiterate, are not just numbers, they are violations of rights derived from risks that can be differentiated at the regional level and that could be avoided if the State were to guarantee the right to defend rights.

Under this critical view, the Somos Defensores Program (PSD) interprets the 727 aggressions that were directed against leaders and defenders during 2024. It is difficult to start from this data to state that there was a reduction, since there is no significant decrease – this being an observation that we make for the second consecutive year. On the contrary: if we break down this figure and know the stories of the victims, we find that fear has increased, as well as silence, and that both the armed conflict and the organized crime have been profoundly transformed, without the national government and other State institutions deploying preventive actions against the dangers arising from the dynamics that have been established.