International Humanitarian Law in the judgments of the Inter-American Court: An analysis of Colombian cases

Abstract

International Humanitarian Law -IHL- has been applied as an auxiliary source in cases in which the Inter-American Court has faced violations of human rights, produced in the different countries that signed the jurisdiction of the same and the Inter-American Convention. While it is true that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (COHR) has the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights as its benchmark and the protocols that complement it, omitting as a corpus iuris from its statutes to IHL, it causes human rights to fragment , conceived from the doctrine as indivisible and interdependent and, likewise, leads to a lack of protection of the victims of different armed conflicts, such as the Colombian one, against the application of transitional justice in its guarantees of integral reparation and above all of non-repetition. The investigation that is developed next, analyzes the application of International Humanitarian Law in nine cases in which the Colombian State has been linked as the defendant in the judgments of the Inter-American Court and reflects on the way inwhich the Inter-American Court applies this international instrument in its judgments.