PBI-Colombia accompanies Nydia Erika Bautista Foundation at First Commission meeting to push for Bill on women searchers

On March 15, PBI-Colombia tweeted:

“We are accompanying the Meeting with the @FirstCommission to promote the Bill on #WomenSearchers of #EnforcedDisappearance in Colombia @nydia_erika”

On Instagram they noted:

“We accompanied the Meeting with the First Commission of the House of Representatives to push for the prioritization of the dialogue of the Bill on #WomenSearchers of victims of #EnforcedDisappearance in Colombia as @fundacionnydiaerikabautista”

The Comisión Primera (First Commission) is the “Permanent Constitutional Commission of the Congress of the Republic of Colombia that processes in first debate the Bills and Legislative Act.”

Luis Alberto Albán Urbano, a member of the House of Representatives, also tweeted:

“Today in @ComisionPrimera we met with International Human Rights Organizations, Embassies of the US, Ireland and France, as well as the @nydia_erika Foundation to talk and advance work on the project of women seekers.”

He adds:

“This project seeks to provide special and reinforced protection to women and seekers, tools for public and social awareness, information, care and prevention measures. Also instruments to guarantee health, education, housing and social security.

In addition, the creation of a Single Registry of Women and Seekers whose usefulness is associated with the accreditation of the status of seeker of a victim of forced disappearance.”

In the photo below, the delegation stands with Alirio Uribe Muñoz, a lawyer with the PBI-Colombia accompanied (CCAJAR) and now a member of the House of Representatives.

Law on women seekers

In June 2022, El Espectador also reported: “The Nydia Erika Bautista Foundation and seven organizations of victims of forced disappearance from different regions of the country delivered a document to Father Francisco de Roux with 15 recommendations that they hope that entity will record in its final report.”

Along with the recommendation of declassifying military archives, it was also proposed to create a Law for the Protection of Women Seekers.

El Espectador explains:

“Comprehensive Law for the Protection of the Rights of Women and Family Seekers: The victims also demand that State policy include a law that recognizes their rights, their contribution to the truth and the costs that their work has implied in their lives and in their physical, mental and family integrity. “A Comprehensive Law that dignifies their ethical and political role in society and the democratic rule of law and as women caregivers heads of family to whom the State has de facto delegated the search for the disappeared,” the document says.

Protect the rights of missing women and searchers who have been victims of sexual violence so that they can access truth and justice. The document argues that there is a “total absence of criminal and disciplinary investigation of gender violations – including sexual violence – suffered by disappeared women and perpetrated against women searchers, under the armed conflict.””

PBI-Colombia has accompanied the Nydia Erika Bautista Foundation occasionally from 2007 and in full since 2016.

The Foundation was created in 1997. It has placed the issue of the enforced disappearance of more than eighty thousand people as a result of the armed conflict on the national agenda and has promoted national legislation on the subject. It was named after Nydia Erika, Yanette’s 32-year-old sister, who was disappeared on August 30, 1987 during an operation carried out by Army Brigades III and XX. There are indications that Nydia Erika suffered torture and sexual violence during her captivity before being executed.

PBI-Colombia also recently accompanied the Nydia Erika Bautista Foundation at meetings in Washington, DC and Los Angeles, California on this issue.