2012

For more than twenty years, I have dedicated my professional life to the promotion and protection of human rights. I have focused in particular on documenting grave human rights violations - including arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial executions - and on providing support to the victims as well as their relatives. I started my professional career as a human rights lawyer in Colombia and was then entrusted to participate as a Public Prosecutor in a specialized unit to investigate human rights violations. Due to the sensitivity of my job and of the investigations I was conducting against State-related groups, I received threats, which eventually led me to leave my home country.

I studied for a PhD in international law, human rights law and criminal law at the University of Salamanca in Spain. After 4 years, I felt the necessity to promote and protect human rights in the field and went back to Latin America to work as Director of the Regional Office of the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) in Costa Rica. CEJIL is a non-governmental organisation, whose mission is to represent victims and litigate cases in the Inter-American system of human rights at the Organization of American States. Further to this experience, I started an academic career and worked as a professor of law at a number of universities in Mexico, including the Universidad Ibero-Americana, the Instituto de Formacion de la Procuraduría de Justicia del Distrito Federal de la Ciudad de Mexico (Attorney General´s Training Center in Mexico City) and currently in the Master’s programme of human rights and democracy at the Facultad Latino-Americana de Ciencias Sociales.

Due to the sensitivity of my job and of the investigations I was conducting against State-related groups, I received threats, which eventually led me to leave my home country.

As Mexico was at a historical turning point, I decided to move there to support the democratic transition. I worked with the Mexican Government as Director of the Human Rights Cooperation Programme with the European Union. In this position, I coordinated capacity-building sessions for law enforcement personnel on the incorporation of international treaties in Mexican law as well as on international best practices on relevant human rights issues.

Upon completion of the programme, I worked for the Office of the High Commissioner of United Nations as a liaison with the Mexican Congress to promote the reform of the Constitution in relation to human rights. This experience led to extremely positive results: alongside the efforts deployed by other human rights non-governmental organisations, activists and academics, my work led the Mexican Congress in 2011 to approve the most important reform of its Constitution in many decades, guaranteeing the full protection of human rights for every person in this country. International treaties are now part of the Mexican Constitution and have now legally the same hierarchy as the Constitution itself.

Afterwards, the Board of Directors of the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH) invited me to become their new general director. I have been provided with the opportunity to work on human rights cases at both the national and the international level. I have represented and continue to work for hundreds of victims and relatives of victims of grave human rights violations, which have occurred in the context of the so-called ´war on organized crime´ launched by the Felipe Calderon’s Government. In the past five years 60,000 deaths have been registered throughout the country. During 2011, 11 deaths of human rights defenders were recorded as well as threats, harassments and attacks directed against them.

One of the main cases I have been working on was the one on the social leader Rosendo Radilla Pacheco, who was disappeared at a military checkpoint in the town of Atoyac de Alvarez, in the state of Guerrero in 1974. Decades later, this unsolved case reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), which resulted in a paradigmatic ruling condemning the governmental policies of the 1960’s and 1970’s during which authoritarian regimes used the military forces to quell opposition movements.

The IACHR established the responsibility of the Mexican State for the violation of Mr. Radilla's rights to life, liberty and personal integrity. The IACHR called for the necessary legislative reforms that would harmonise the Military Code of Justice with recognised international standards on the matter and the American Convention on Human Rights. The goal was to prevent further cases of serious human rights violations committed by members of the armed forces from being investigated in military courts and have an investigation carried out by the ordinary justice system.

Whilst continuing to direct the CMDPDH, I decided to come to the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York to benefit from this unique programme for human rights defenders at one of the most highly regarded and prestigious universities in the United Kingdom. This experience provided me with the opportunity to further improve my English skills as well as to get in touch with both human rights defenders from all over the world and with very talented professors. This was a privileged moment, which allowed me to share human rights related experiences and challenges as well as best practices and ways forward; for which I am most grateful and I will bring back to Mexico in my ever-lasting commitment to promote and protect human rights.