U.N. Special Rapporteur Pablo de Greiff speaks about the international experience in assisting victims of conflict
The Max Planck Foundation and the Colombian Victims Unit (Unidad para la Atención y Reparación Integral a las Víctimas) held a joint conference on reparations and intersectionality in Bogotá on 30 November 2017. The conference marks the end of a project which aimed at enabling the Victims Unit to fulfil its duty to prioritise groups of victims of the armed conflict who are, at the same time, subject to structural discrimination. This includes – among others – Afrocolombians, indigenous people, persons with disabilities and LGBTI persons. In the course of the project the Foundation’s experts enabled staff of the Victims Unit and other state institutions that are involved in the process of reparations to apply the intersectional approach, which originates from the Afro-American feminist movement and gives due attention to the complexity of a person’s identity.
The input by both keynote speakers – U.N. Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-recurrence, Dr. Pablo de Greiff, and the Director of the Institute for Intersectionality Research and Policy at Simon Fraser University, Dr. Olena Hankivsky – was much appreciated by the audience, which included experts and practitioners from different parts of the country.
In their closing remarks, Tilmann Röder (MPFPR) and Ana Maria Torres Sanz (Victims Unit) expressed their thanks to the German Federal Foreign Office, which funded the project, and the German Embassy in Colombia for their support during the project.