Colombia's plan to slash peace court budget alarms war-crimes victims' families

The administration of Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella plans to slash spending on the JEP, the country's transitional justice court. Under the 2027 budget announced this month, bodies like the JEP face dramatic reductions; the cuts to the JEP alone are valued at around 181 billion Colombian pesos, roughly $57 million.

The JEP was set up in 2016 as part of the peace deal between Colombia's government and the FARC, then the country's largest rebel group. The court handles the investigation and prosecution of crimes committed during the six-decade internal armed conflict, in which more than 450,664 people were killed. More than 100,000 people have also been reported missing in the conflict, and their fate remains unknown.

Alongside the budget cuts, a Senate committee on Wednesday advanced a bill to eliminate the JEP altogether by March 2028 and transfer its functions to the general court system. The question facing the court is therefore not only reduced funding, but its very survival.

Victims' families say the court has offered closure that the regular criminal justice system was never able to provide. Angela Cordon was only a teenager when her father and uncle disappeared in the southwestern department of Huila. Her uncle Reynaldo Cordon Herrera, a grocer, went missing on January 22, 2003, while travelling by truck. The next month, her father Guillermo Cordon Herrera set out to discover what had happened to his brother. He called home one night to say he had made contact with the rebel fighters he believed responsible for the abduction. It was the last time his family heard from him; neither man's body was ever found.

Angela says she has dedicated her life to the search, and credits the JEP with helping her find answers: through the court she learned about her father and uncle's time in captivity and the site of their execution, and the JEP has worked with former FARC members to try to locate their remains. “Fewer resources mean fewer missions to the field to find answers, less humanitarian personnel,” she said. “It probably means that we will never be able to return to the site.”

President de la Espriella has framed the reduction as necessary to combat Colombia's rising public debt, which exceeds $370 billion. “It is my duty to manage spending, demand results, and allocate the government's limited resources to a justice system that serves everyone,” he wrote in a September statement. He estimated the JEP's payroll budget alone was north of 404 billion pesos, or $127 million, in 2026.

Critics, however, question whether austerity is the real motive. At around 634 trillion pesos or $200 billion, de la Espriella's 2027 budget is the largest spending package in the country's history and increases spending overall. The president has also repeatedly criticised the JEP as slow and ineffective and accused its investigations of bias against military members and leniency toward rebels. In an interview with the radio show Recap Blu, he accused the JEP of “persecuting the heroes of the homeland” while “washing the hands of the guerrillas who committed crimes against humanity”.

Ana Maria Rodriguez, a lawyer who represents victims, described the accusation of bias as “patently false”, pointing out that the JEP has convicted some of the FARC's top leadership. “It hasn't been perfect or complete,” she said. “But the peace process here has become a model studied by other countries around the world. We have to keep this process functional.” She believes budget cuts will lead to fewer convictions and further impunity, since many perpetrators have never faced any justice mechanism outside the JEP.

To close unsolved cases, the court has offered leniency to soldiers, rebels and other fighters in exchange for cooperation, with sentences typically involving rehabilitation work and community service instead of prison. Those sentences have fuelled some of the criticism, but Rodriguez says such trade-offs are necessary to offer resolution to families. “It isn't clear how cases will be able to proceed without witness cooperation programmes,” she said, predicting that shrinking the JEP's funding will be “absolutely disastrous for victims”.

Ahead of the expected cuts, more than 20 Colombian Congress members signed an open letter to the International Criminal Court asking for help. The ICC shares a similar mandate with the JEP and supported the 2016 peace deal that created it. “We are concerned that [the budget's] approval will jeopardise investigations, trials and the execution of sentences for crimes under the court's jurisdiction,” the lawmakers wrote.