Restorative Transitional Justice at Work: Colombia’s Historic Rulings on Atrocity Crimes.

Gabriel Rojas Andrade
Oct 2
6 min read

How Colombia’s peace tribunal has broken new ground by imposing restorative sanctions on both guerrillas and soldiers for atrocity crimes, testing whether transitional justice can balance accountability, truth, and restorative justice at scale.

In September 2025, Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, JEP) delivered two historic rulings within days of each other:

On 16 September, the tribunal sentenced the last Secretariat of the FARC-EP for the guerrilla’s policy of kidnapping, imposing eight-year Special Sanctions to be served through restorative projects including the search for the disappeared, humanitarian demining, environmental recovery, and symbolic reparation.
On 18 September, the tribunal sentenced twelve officers of the Army’s La Popa Battalion for crimes against humanity committed between 2002 and 2005, ordering restrictions on liberty alongside restorative projects focused on memorialization and community repair.

These rulings matter for three reasons. First, they extend accountability to both insurgent and state actors for systematic atrocities that had long been shrouded in impunity. Second, they illustrate the JEP’s unique design, which combines restorative sanctions for those who acknowledge responsibility with the threat of retributive prison sentences (up to twenty years) for those who do not. Third, they show how judicial decisions themselves can become acts of symbolic reparation—as when the La Popa ruling was read aloud with poetry, the naming of victims, and public recognition of families’ suffering.

The JEP’s Hybrid Model

The JEP, born of the 2016 Final Peace Agreement, integrates three logics:

International criminal law: jurisdiction over crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Macro-criminality: pattern-based cases against those most responsible.
Restorative justice: conditional sanctions emphasizing truth, acknowledgment, and reparation, in place of prison.

The tribunal does not attempt to adjudicate every incident individually, but instead reconstructs patterns of criminality, situating individual guilt within broader structural frameworks. At the same time, it reserves retributive prison sentences of up to twenty years for those who refuse to contribute to truth and reparation and are found guilty after trial.

The FARC Secretariat and La Popa rulings demonstrate how this hybrid design is now moving into practice.

The FARC Secretariat Ruling: Accountability for Kidnapping

The first ruling, on 16 September, targeted the last Secretariat of the FARC-EP: Rodrigo Londoño, Pablo Catatumbo, Pastor Alape, Milton Toncel, Jaime Parra, Julián Gallo, and Rodrigo Granda. They were held responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity tied to the guerrilla’s decades-long policy of kidnapping, which left more than 21,000 victims.

The tribunal found that kidnapping was a deliberate organizational policy, carried out through three main patterns: financing, pressuring the state for prisoner exchanges, and imposing territorial control. Victims endured prolonged captivity, humiliation, violence, and in many cases, disappearance and death.

The Secretariat members received eight-year Special Sanctions, the maximum allowed under the Peace Agreement, consisting of:

Search for the disappeared, beginning in a local cemetery in western Colombia.
Humanitarian demining of territories affected by guerrilla landmines.
Environmental recovery projects.
Symbolic reparation, including dignifying narratives, memory devices, and public acknowledgment.

They will face restrictions on mobility and residence, electronic monitoring, and continuous supervision by the JEP and the UN.

This marks a judicial first: guerrilla leaders once untouchable before ordinary courts are now bound to visible reparative work, under the gaze of victims and international verification.

The La Popa Ruling: State Crimes and Symbolic Reparation

Two days later, on 18 September, the JEP issued another landmark ruling in Case 03 on extrajudicial killings, specifically the La Popa Battalion sub-case on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast.

Between 2002 and 2005, soldiers of La Popa executed at least 135 civilians—peasants, Afro-Colombians, and Indigenous youth—who were then falsely reported as guerrillas killed in combat. The tribunal identified two macro-criminal patterns: collusion with paramilitaries to deliver victims, and systematic targeting of vulnerable civilians to inflate combat results.

Twelve officers were sentenced to Special Sanctions of five to eight years. They are not the top generals—the national macro-case will address those higher up, and those who refuse acknowledgment face up to twenty years in prison. But this sub-case matters: it establishes responsibility, dismantles the “bad apple” narrative, and exposes systematic criminality within military structures.

Their sanctions combine restrictions on liberty with restorative projects:

A Caribbean Coast Memorial Plan, beginning with a mausoleum of 700 ossuaries in Valledupar.
A Wiwa Cultural Center and a Kankuamo Harmonization House for Indigenous cultural restoration.
Multipurpose Houses for psychosocial support and community memory.
Livelihood and productive projects to strengthen communities.

What makes this ruling extraordinary is not only the sanctions but the way they were delivered. The public reading of the ruling became itself an act of symbolic reparation. It opened not with dry legal reasoning but with a poetic narrative:

“La tierra seca se le quedó atascada entre los dedos de los pies… Observado por una brisa solitaria, el abuelo Mario cerró los ojos y esperó… Abrazó esa imagen mientras la cuerda se tensaba en su garganta enrojecida.”

This passage told the story of Carlos Mario Navarro, an 18-year-old Indigenous Wiwa executed by La Popa soldiers in 2004. It recounted the despair of his grandfather, who later took his own life. In the ruling, each victim was named. Each family’s pain was acknowledged.

By weaving poetry and testimony into judicial language, the tribunal transformed the sanctioning into a memorial ritual. Law became a medium of condemnation, mourning, and collective recognition.

Victims as Protagonists

Both rulings placed victims at the center. In the FARC case, survivors confronted the former commanders directly, demanding acknowledgment and concrete reparative projects. In La Popa, Indigenous councils and Afro-Colombian communities shaped sanctions that addressed collective harms to territory and culture.

Victim participation in shaping sanctions is judicially binding. The JEP recognizes that harms are intergenerational, territorial, and cultural.

Judges as Peacebuilders

These rulings also redefine the judicial role. JEP magistrates convene restorative encounters, ensure truth contributions, coordinate with state agencies, and supervise the feasibility of reparative projects.

They also carry the burden of legitimacy. Each ruling is scrutinized—too lenient for some, too harsh for others. By opening rulings with poetry and by naming each victim, magistrates take on the role of peacebuilders, crafting legal acts that are also social rituals.

Tensions and Limits

The model is not free of challenges:

Perceptions of impunity: Many Colombians equate justice with prison, and restorative sanctions often face skepticism.
Implementation risks: Sanctions depend on government resources and coordination; failure could undermine public trust.
Macro vs. individual justice: Macro-case truth can leave some families without specific answers.

Yet these limits are intrinsic to transitional justice. No mechanism can simultaneously deliver full punishment, complete truth, and total repair. The JEP navigates these tensions through a conditional system that blends restorative and retributive options—an unprecedented attempt to apply restorative justice at the scale of mass atrocity, and to test whether its transformative promise can take root in a transitional context.

Global Significance

These rulings matter globally. They demonstrate:

Dual accountability: Both insurgent and state actors face sanction for crimes against humanity.
Restorative justice at scale: Even the gravest crimes can be met with restorative sanctions, judicially enforced and internationally verified.
Symbolic reparation through judicial ritual: The public reading of rulings can itself become an act of acknowledgment and healing.

Restoration over Retribution

The September 2025 rulings against the FARC Secretariat and La Popa Battalion officers show both the achievements and the fragility of Colombia’s peace tribunal. Guerrilla leaders once untouchable must now search for the disappeared, clear mines, and honor victims through memory. Soldiers once decorated must now build memorials, restore Indigenous centers, and repair communities. These rulings establish truth, impose responsibility, and bind perpetrators to visible reparative obligations. They also challenge conventional understandings of justice: accountability is not only prison, but restoration; not only condemnation, but acknowledgment.

At the same time, the JEP remains an experimental and aspirational tribunal, still testing the practical reach of its hybrid model that merges macro-criminal investigation with retributive and restorative justice principles. While it has introduced bold innovations such as participatory sanctions, collective acknowledgment hearings, and symbolic reparations, it operates in a contested political environment and under close public scrutiny. Its real measure of success will only emerge once sanctions are implemented and their interaction with international criminal law standards, victim satisfaction, and perpetrator reintegration can be assessed. The tribunal is thus a work in progress—an unfinished experiment in transitional justice.

Yet whatever their long-term impact, the September 2025 rulings—against the FARC’s last Secretariat and the La Popa Battalion officers—stand as historic milestones. They mark the first time in Colombia, and perhaps anywhere, that a peace tribunal has imposed restorative sanctions on both insurgent and state actors for crimes against humanity.

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Gabriel Rojas Andrade is a Professor at the Faculty of Law, Universidad de los Andes.

This post was made using strictly public information and does not reflect or compromise the position of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.

The opinions expressed in this post do not necessarily represent those of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, and the author does not write on its behalf.