Symposium on the 10th Anniversary of the Colombian Peace Agreement – Part IV: Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace after its First Final Sentences: “Executing Restorative Sanctions and the Limits of International Oversight”

—Milton César Jiménez Ramírez,  Professor of Law, Universidad de Caldas

On 15 August 2026, nineteen people sentenced by Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) began serving restorative sanctions, the first to do so. Since 2017, the JEP has been litigated and analyzed almost exclusively as a problem of design: whether its sanctions satisfy the duty to punish, whether its selection criteria protect victims’ rights, and whether it respects constitutional limits. The Constitutional Court and the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) have tested those questions, as have Inter-American standards. They have now been answered, at least provisionally. No review of design can settle the questions that remain.

This post argues that the decisive question for the Colombian model has shifted from design to execution. The second-instance rulings of 1 July 2026 made that shift explicit by tying the enforcement of restorative sanctions to the diligence of the Executive. The three layers of scrutiny that examined the JEP’s design never gave it a definitive endorsement; each remained conditional and keyed to performance. Execution now discloses what those examinations deferred, just as a government elected by less than one percentage point, and openly hostile to the jurisdiction, has endorsed cuts to its budget.

From First Sentences to Enforceable Sanctions: The Problem of Restorative Execution

On 16 September 2025, the JEP’s First Instance Trial Section for Cases of Recognition of Truth and Responsibility sentenced the seven members of the last Secretariat of the FARC-EP — the guerrilla’s highest command body — as those most responsible for the policy of kidnapping pursued between 1993 and 2012, which produced at least 21,396 documented victimizing events. It imposed the maximum restorative sanction available under the Final Agreement (sanción propia) for those who fully and early acknowledge responsibility: eight years of meaningful restriction of liberty and rights, without incarceration, involving activities such as searching for the disappeared, demining, restoring the environment, and acts of remembrance. Two days later, twelve former members of the La Popa Artillery Battalion received sentences of five to eight years for 135 extrajudicial killings and forced disappearances committed in the Caribbean region. On 19 December 2025, in its first adversarial transitional trial, the First Instance Trial Section for Cases of Absence of Recognition of Truth and Responsibility sentenced Colonel (ret.) Publio Hernán Mejía to twenty years of ordinary imprisonment for seventy-two murders, forced disappearances, and acts of torture committed while he commanded that same battalion, expressly denying any alternative sanction or house arrest. The last two decisions address the objection that the JEP punishes nothing: within the same macro-case and the same military unit, acknowledging responsibility produced restorative sanctions, and refusing it produced ordinary imprisonment.

On 1 July 2026, the Appeals Chamber confirmed both restorative judgments in the final instance, resolving thirty-one appeals, and the sanctioned persons themselves. It adjusted specific findings — in the FARC case it revoked the charge of enslavement, on the ground that the defendants had not been given the opportunity to accept or reject responsibility for it, and in the La Popa case it revoked the charge of torture — and, more importantly, modified the first-instance judgments “to reinforce the effectiveness of the restorative sanctions”: it ordered the incorporation of proposals made by victims, precise timetables, and concrete restrictions on rights and liberties throughout the eight years of restorative work, which will run from August 2026 to February 2034 across seven regions of the country.

The significance of these decisions at an institutional level should be highlighted. The Appeals Chamber instructed the national Government to oversee the restorative works’ implementation, finance the projects, and ensure the social security of those serving sanctions. It established a reinforced monitoring architecture — consolidated six-monthly reports, a final report, and a special compliance hearing — and specified that any subsequent modification to the projects must be authorized judicially rather than administratively. Execution began on 15 August 2026 with nineteen sanctioned persons; the first project is a mausoleum containing more than seven hundred ossuaries at the Ecce Homo cemetery in Valledupar.

Here, the restorative model reveals its structural asymmetry. A custodial sentence requires only custody. A sanction consisting of demining, the search for the disappeared, and community reconstruction requires budget, logistics, security, and inter-institutional coordination sustained over eight years across seven regions. The Appeals Chamber evidently understood this, which is why it judicialized the monitoring and designated the Executive as the coordinating authority. Yet judicializing monitoring does not generate capacity; it merely exposes its absence and renders it justiciable.

International Oversight of Restorative Execution

That asymmetry also displaces the case’s international dimension. In fact, on 28 October 2021, the ICC Prosecutor closed a preliminary examination that had lasted seventeen years, invoking positive complementarity. The closure did not endorse the JEP’s output; it was tied to a cooperation agreement under which Colombia first undertook to guarantee the constitutional and legal framework of the jurisdiction and to refrain from interfering with its functions. A second instrument followed in 2024, and in May 2026 Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan made the third official visit since the closure, stressing that the JEP’s sustained success requires permanent coordination and commitment from all State entities. Significantly, after confirming the sentences, the JEP communicated them to international bodies, in order to place on record the Colombian State’s obligations to prosecute, punish, and secure the enforcement of judgments for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Inter-American debate is similarly open. The Inter-American Court has consolidated a robust set of standards regarding the duty to investigate, prosecute, and punish serious human rights violations, and the prohibition of amnesties for crimes against humanity (Barrios Altos), while accepting in El Mozote that negotiated transitions may modulate penalties, provided they do not become illusory. In Members and Militants of the Unión Patriótica v. Colombia (2022), it declared the State responsible for the extermination of more than six thousand people and ordered Colombia to remove the obstacles to impunity.

Both regimes’ limitation lies in the nature of the conduct they must now assess. The conditions that could reactivate ICC scrutiny—defunding, restrictions on competence, interference with judicial autonomy—are not inherent flaws in the system that more carefully drafted amendments could rectify; they are contingencies of governance. The same applies to the Inter-American standard that penalties must not be illusory: whether a restorative sanction is illusory depends on whether the works are actually performed and verified, not on how they were originally conceived. Both systems were built to review what a State has decided; they are now asked to evaluate what a State fails to do.

Restorative Execution in a Contested Political Context

The presidential runoff of 21 June 2026 was decided by 0.96 percentage points — 49.66 percent against 48.70 percent, a margin of 250,830 votes, the narrowest in the history of Colombian runoffs. The winner, Abelardo de la Espriella, had made the JEP a central object of criticism during the campaign, describing it as a political directorate disguised as a tribunal, and took office on 7 August 2026. His government abolished the Office of the High Commissioner for Peace and the peace-implementation unit, calling it administrative restructuring, and announced the dismantling of what it describes as a system of impunity.

The dispute acquired concrete form with the 2027 budget. On 17 September 2026, Senator Enrique Gómez Martínez (Salvación Nacional) filed two motions to transfer COP 100,000 million — approximately USD 33 million — from the JEP’s appropriation to the ordinary justice system. Ramelli characterized the initiative as a strategy of “economic asphyxiation”, warning that the reduction represents 62 percent of the funds earmarked for goods and services and would compromise COP 62,478 million committed to victim protection schemes, on top of an accumulated underfunding of COP 84,663 million. Two further initiatives were announced in the same weeks: a constitutional amendment sponsored by Senator Juan Fernando Caicedo (Centro Democrático) subjecting JEP judgments to automatic review by the Superior Military and Police Court, with the sentences suspended while that review proceeds; and a further constitutional amendment, also promoted by Senator Gómez, designed to prevent any extension of the jurisdiction’s mandate.

The JEP’s response directly tested the international framework. On 18 September 2026, the Chief Justice of the JEP wrote to the ICC Deputy Prosecutors Nazhat Shameem Khan and Mame Mandiaye Niang — the same office that had visited Bogotá four months earlier — invoking Articles 1 and 6 of the 2021 Cooperation Agreement and arguing that these initiatives amount to a breach of the commitments expressly assumed by Colombia before the Office of the Prosecutor. Subjecting JEP judgments to automatic review by the military criminal jurisdiction, the letter contends, “would alter the structure and the competences of the judicial scheme established in the Final Peace Agreement”. The JEP also announced that it would bring the matter before the UN, Inter-American bodies, and the guarantor States.

The Government’s reply is not frivolous, and its constitutional basis deserves to be stated. On 20 September 2026, President de la Espriella rejected the letter’s “content, scope and tone”, maintaining that “for my Government to take a position and for Congress to debate the National Budget does not constitute a threat against any judge: it is the Constitution functioning”, and that “a reallocation grounded in public priorities is not interference: it is governing”. The argument invokes the budgetary competences that Articles 346 and 347 of the Constitution assign to the Executive and to Congress, and it identifies a genuine difficulty: if every reduction in a judicial body’s appropriation could be characterized as interference, budgetary deliberation concerning the judiciary would become impossible. The objection cannot be answered by denying the competence; it can only be answered by asking whether its exercise, in this instance, is compatible with an international commitment that the State assumed.

The legal margin for the Government’s broader program is, in any event, narrow, and it is worth stating precisely. The JEP is not an administrative body that the Government can suppress by decree: Legislative Act 01 of 2017 created it, and it has constitutional rank, so eliminating or substantially reforming it would require a constitutional amendment passed through eight debates in Congress and subject to review by the Constitutional Court under the substitution doctrine. Two further constraints operate: Legislative Act 02 of 2017 makes those contents of the Final Agreement that correspond to international humanitarian law and to constitutionally defined fundamental rights a mandatory parameter of interpretation for three presidential terms — a period that covers precisely the Government inaugurated in 2026 and expires in August 2030 — and the 2021 cooperation agreement commits the State to guarantee the jurisdiction’s constitutional and legal framework. Consistently with those limits, the Minister of Justice has ruled out immediate abolition and has framed the Government’s program as strict oversight of the tribunal’s functioning, resources, and results.

What the constitutional shield protects, however, is the institution’s existence, not the material performance of its judgments, and the two diverge over time. Under transitional Article 15 of Legislative Act 01 of 2017, the JEP has ten years from its effective entry into operation to conclude the function of filing indictments, a term that expires in 2028, and a further five years — until 2033 — to conclude its jurisdictional activity, a period that may be extended only “by law” and at the request of its own magistrates. The restorative sanctions, confirmed in July 2026, run until February 2034, by contrast. The enforcement of the sentences therefore outlasts the ordinary mandate of the court that must supervise it, and the extension mechanism on which that supervision depends is precisely what one of the announced constitutional amendments seeks to foreclose. A government that cannot lawfully abolish the JEP may nonetheless determine, through budgetary restriction, administrative inertia, and the ordinary legislative calendar, whether the sanctions it imposes ever become real.

Conclusion

Two propositions follow. The first concerns the Colombian model. Its design was examined repeatedly and survived each time, but never unconditionally; the question that will determine its fate is no longer doctrinal but practical—whether restorative works are executed, verified, and completed between 2026 and 2034, under a government that has formally endorsed reducing the resources available for that purpose. The second concerns the instruments of international supervision. The JEP’s appeal to the Office of the Prosecutor and to the Security Council is not a routine gesture: it asks whether the commitments that sustained the closure of the preliminary examination in 2021 can be enforced against measures — an appropriation bill, a procedural reform — that are, taken individually, exercises of ordinary constitutional competences. That is the question on which the credibility of positive complementarity now rests.

Neither proposition defends the jurisdiction’s own record, and the argument would be incomplete without the objection that this record invites. After eight years of operation and eleven macro-cases, the JEP has delivered four judgments on the merits; on average, 65.5 months separate the opening of an investigation from the first imputation, and about 53 months separate an accusation from a first-instance judgment. The tribunal’s own President has conceded the point. “Perhaps we could have been a little more agile — I think so, and it has to be said,” he acknowledged at the close of 2025. The observation is not merely administrative, because it bears directly on the calendar examined above. Transitional Article 15 requires the indictment function to conclude in 2028; at the pace recorded so far, the macro-cases still awaiting judgment are unlikely to reach that stage in time. Delay is therefore not a separate grievance but the mechanism through which ordinary political pressure becomes an existential risk — and it lends the Government’s insistence on results a practical force that its constitutional argument alone does not supply.

The objection has limits of its own, and they deserve to be stated with equal precision. The macro-case model traded speed for scope, and the scope is considerable: 432 imputations, acknowledgment of responsibility in close to 92 percent of them, 16,097 accredited victims, 444 collective subjects, and 1,035 waivers of criminal prosecution — in proceedings that ordinary criminal justice, on one analyst’s estimate, would have taken thirty years to complete. The jurisdiction also reports some 3,600 decisions with the effect of a judgment and projects seven merits judgments by the end of 2026. The difficulty is not that the JEP has been idle; it is that the calendar it must now meet is considerably less forgiving than the one under which it learned to work.

This makes the Colombian case particularly valuable for analysis now. While transitional justice studies have extensive material on how such systems are created and how courts evaluate their alignment with international obligations, they offer less insight into what occurs when a final restorative sentence needs to be enforced over eight years by a government-led State machinery that opposed its jurisdiction. Colombia is currently conducting this experiment in real time, and the results will reveal more about the feasibility of restorative sanctions than any additional rulings on their structure.

Suggested citation: Milton César Jiménez Ramírez, Symposium on the 10th Anniversary of the Colombian Peace Agreement – Part IV: Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace after its First Final Sentences: “Executing Restorative Sanctions and the Limits of International Oversight”, Int’l J. Const. L Blog, Oct. 31, 2026, at: