Colombia’s new ombudsman, Iris Marín, will prioritize gender violence and discrimination against women as one of the main axes of her agenda, which will develop over four years of management.

“I want to emphasize that, unfortunately, one of the human rights crises is the crisis of violence and discrimination against women,” said the defender, who took office on September 1 and is the first woman to occupy this position, at a press conference in Bogotá.

Marín assured in the framework of the celebration of the National Human Rights Day that sexist violence is not usually seen “as a human rights crisis” because when thinking about human rights in Colombia “they think of war, but they don’t even think about gender violence.”

Between May 2023 and May 2024, 630 femicides were recorded in Colombia and, so far this year, the National Institute of Health has registered more than 100,000 cases of gender violence, whether physical, sexual, neglect or psychological abandonment. In addition, in 2023 the Institute of Legal Medicine carried out more than 20,000 examinations for alleged sexual offense, of which 14,366 were for children under 18 years of age.

Therefore, since his administration in the Ombudsman’s Office, he wants to strengthen protection programs, access to justice, issue early warnings for gender violence and improve the technical defense of victims.

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Other axes of its agenda will be to monitor human rights in the conflict, in climate change and will place special emphasis on the rights of minors.

Since 2017, the Ombudsman’s Office has issued 320 early alerts in territories due to the situation of violence, of which 143 are still active. This is a system that was implemented after the peace agreement to alert the institutions of a possible aggravation of the conflict and the danger of communities.

In addition, until the end of August, 166 social leaders were murdered in Colombia and the defender considered that “the situation of protection of leaders is not improving,” so she hopes that the Ombudsman’s Office will serve as prevention and that “it is a neutral actor to promote that humanitarian agreements can be adopted in a low-profile way.”

In this sense, Marín asked that the Ombudsman’s Office be taken into account in the peace processes with armed groups and was emphatic in pointing out that the people who signed the peace agreement and then deserted, the Government “must demand the consequences of having returned to arms.”

“There should be no incentives to enter infinite circles of negotiation and return to arms,” Marín said, without referring but alluding to the negotiations that the Government has just undertaken with the Second Marquetalia, a dissent commanded by ‘Iván Márquez’, who in turn was a peace negotiator of the FARC in the 2016 agreement.

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