Ten United Nations Special Rapporteurs call on Colombia not to resume glyphosate spraying

The Spanish international news agency EFE reports: “Ten UN special rapporteurs sent a letter to the President of Colombia, Iván Duque, asking the Government not to resume the aerial spraying of illicit crops with the herbicide glyphosate, a plan that the Ministry of Defense wants to undertake in the coming months.”

The NGO Dejusticia released the letter on March 7.

The letter says: “[The resumption of spraying] would violate the peace agreement and against the provisions of the Constitutional Court regarding the hierarchy between the strategies for the eradication of illicit crops.”

The letter also says that spraying would be carried out in “a context of systematic violence against indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples and human rights defenders who work to protect the right to health and the environment in the country.”

And it adds that spraying poses “enormous risks for human rights and the environment, at the same time that it would not comply with the conditions established in the ruling T-236 of the Constitutional Court, nor with international obligations. in the matter.”

Among the signatories to the letter are Mary Lawlor and José Francisco Cali Tzay, respectively the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders and the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples.

The EFE article further reports: “The current Minister of Defense, Diego Molano, has repeated on several occasions that the Executive’s plans are to start spraying in April and that the Air Force is getting ready to do so.”

When Julia Figueroa and Andrea Nocove from the Luis Carlos Perez Lawyers’ Collective (CCALCP) took part in a PBI advocacy tour in Canada in November 2019 they highlighted concerns about the forced eradication of coca crops.