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• Collection of good practices of catalan cooperation
• Methodological practical guides of cooperation

Good Practices 6

Performances tackled by the Taula Catalana for the Peace and Humans Rights in Colombia

The internal armed conflict more than forty years ago that suffers the country, provoking a series of very serious consequences: being a potentially rich country it maintains a big part of the population below the bearable poverty levels, and also it has provoked massive violations of the human rights: threaten to social leaders, to defenders and advocates of the human rights, to militants of parties of the left wing, to the trade union, forced disappearances, extrajudicial deaths, and moreover, a quantity of wrongly placed interns that is coded in approximately four million persons, who affect principally to the most vulnerable social layers: peasants, natives and afro-Colombian. This situation happens in a climate of strong impunity, with a strong pressure of the different actors armed on the populations (of the paramilitary groups, of the guerrillas and of the same forces of the state - army, police officer-), and with an increase of the economy and the power of political and social influence linked to the drug trafficking, which has gone lodging in an important part of the institutions of the state.

This so extraordinarily complex situation has made that in Catalunya many persons, nongovernmental organizations for peace, human rights and cooperation to the development, trade unions, academic institutions and political institutions are now able to fix the eye in Colombia and then establish this country as the preferable target of its performance.

The duration of an internal conflict for many years, the coexistence with the direct victims of the conflict, the massive violation of the human rights, the demand of international solidarity, as well as the need to press the international institutions and the governments so that they benefit an exit to the situation lived by the country, they led to the creation of the Taula Catalana for the Peace and the Human rights in Colombia, as a space to work jointly facing a negotiated exit of the conflict, facing the promotion and defence of human rights and to press the Colombian government as the main responsible for the application of public policies of respect of the fundamental rights of the Colombian population.

The Taula Catalana is a qualitative fact; it is much more than the sum of the entities and institutions that take part in it. It is a space of agreement where the nongovernmental organizations and the administrations operate, both with different criteria of performance and different targets. We believe that the Taula must focused on putting value on what defines it as an entity with proper personality separated from the others and every single organization that are part of it, independently if they are from civil society or the administrations.

This has meant for the Taula, the challenge of creating some ways of working and of defining targets that are common of all the integral parts, but that at the same time do not take part on the actions and neither the purposes of each of the integral parts of the Taula. This is the extra cost of the Taula, which goes beyond the mere juxtaposition of the actions of its members.

Núria Camps i Vidal
Director of AVALUEM

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