Criminal Justice and Forced Displacement in Colombia

The crime of forced displacement has been a widespread practice in Colombia’s internal armed conflict for several decades. However, forced displacement cannot be reduced to an inherent or unintended effect of the conflict. The armed actors in the Colombian armed conflict—the army and its paramilitary groups, on one hand, and the guerrilla groups, on the other—have used the practice of forced displacement of civilian populations as part of their military strategies to take control of or maintain a presence in certain territories. This paper examines how the criminal justice system in Colombia addresses the forced internal displacement of civilians.