This case served as a follow-up to Auto 092 (women) and Auto 200 (Human Rights Defenders or “HRDs”), combining the two to address the discrete issue of displaced women who are also human rights defenders. This group suffers a heightened risk of attack due to their positionality as women in a patriarchal society as well as their increased visibility due to their leadership and activism.
On December 18, 2017, the Court issued yet another follow-up report, Auto 737, focusing on the displaced women’s issues addressed in Autos 092, 098, and 009, persisting in the context of post-conflict Colombia. The Court found that the government response had not provided any significant information on the implementation of programs ordered in Auto 098, nor on the legislative and public policy measures ordered to prevent, promote and protect the rights of women HRDs. Thus, the court found a low compliance level with Auto 098 measures.
Auto 098 provides a formidable analysis of patriarchy and how this contributes to the retaliatory and punitive use of sexual violence in armed conflict and conflict more broadly. Indeed, as the ESCR-Net report Transforming Conflict-Affected Situations for Women notes, “[i]n Colombia, sexual violence has been used as a tactic to ‘forcibly displace populations from lucrative mining or agricultural zones and from areas of strategic importance for drug trafficking.” Even though this judgment concerns the specific situation of the armed conflict, it provides oversight and management of the situation of the most vulnerable women in Colombia at the moment. This oversight, as well as the tracking and systemic acknowledgement of how patriarchy operates in Colombian society more broadly (i.e. temporally outside of the armed conflict) represents an important step toward gender justice. The judgment also creates this path by providing a clear guide for resisting these patriarchal structures through a rights-based framework.