Disability and Armed Conflict in Colombia

Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) processes aim to transition fighting forces into their peaceful and productive post-conflict communities. DDR processes entail not just laying down weapons, but also linking ex-combatants to sustainable employment, ensuring they have an adequate standard of living, and empowering them to participate in their communities.¹ 

Although armed conflicts both disproportionately affect persons with disabilities² and also cause many new disabilities, ex-combatants with disabilities are too often forgotten in DDR processes. Fortunately, the 2019 United Nations Security Resolution 2475 broke new ground in calling for a dramatic shift towards disability-inclusive DDR processes. It urges “Member States to enable the meaningful participation and representation of persons with disabilities, including their representative organizations, in humanitarian action, conflict prevention, resolution, reconciliation, reconstruction and peacebuilding, and to consult with those with expertise working on disability mainstreaming.”

DDR processes have been active in Colombia for decades, and have continued following the 2016 peace agreement ending Colombia’s 52-year conflict.³ Yet few have examined how these DDR processes have accounted for the experiences of persons with disabilities.⁴ In “Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration in Colombia: Lost human rights opportunities for ex-combatants with disabilities,” published in the Journal of Human Rights’ most recent issue, HPOD Senior Associate Janet E. Lord and Executive Director Professor Michael Ashley Stein, along with Minerva Rivas Velarde and Sir Thomas Shakespeare, find problematic disability inclusion gaps in Colombia’s DDR processes following the 2016 peace agreement, notwithstanding notable Constitutional Court rulings urging disability inclusive processes.⁵ These gaps become even more pressing given Colombia’s ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2011, which obligates states to make DDR processes disability-inclusive.

Because Colombian ex-combatants with disabilities have been largely excluded during the drafting of the peace agreement and the implementation of the DDR processes, they have missed opportunities for their social, economic, and political reintegration.⁶ People interviewed by the authors largely confirmed this phenomenon. In addition to new experiences encountering disability stigma, they reported not having access to jobs, forms of identification, or other aspects of DDR programs. As a result, many cases ex-combatants with disabilities were living in situations of extreme poverty. What’s more, there has been virtually no systematic data collection documenting the experiences of ex-combatants with disabilities, underscoring both this article’s contributions to the field as well as the urgent need to rapidly close these gaps.
 

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