La observancia de la fundamentalidad de los derechos en la indemnización administrativa de los niños, niñas y adolescentes víctimas del conflicto armado interno en situaciones excepcionales de vulnerabilidad

Abstract

Assuming that transitional justice in Colombia was also designed for child and adolescent victims of the internal armed conflict is an obligation that the State and Colombian society are still only half-fulfilling.

The judicial and administrative processes provided for in Colombia through the Victims and Land Restitution Law, and the mechanisms designed for its implementation, are not only aimed at adults who suffered the victimising events referred to in Article 3 of the same law. Articles 181 to 191 and the second paragraph of the aforementioned Article 3 give an account of the protection that is intended for this group of victims in the framework of transitional justice.

In this way, all the mechanisms provided for in national legislation to make the rights to truth, justice and reparation effective, in the stages of care, assistance and reparation, are equally applicable with a focus on children and adolescents.

In particular, administrative compensation has been established in Colombia as one of the comprehensive reparation measures to which the victims of the internal armed conflict are entitled, which seeks pecuniary compensation for the damages caused by the occurrence of a victimising event of those indicated in Law 1448 of 2011. For its access, a series of requirements have been contemplated and, by virtue of the differential approach, priority cases have been recognised that demand reinforced protection, such as those of children and adolescents in exceptional situations of vulnerability. Although the existence of this prioritisation denotes an initial special protection, it is worthwhile to review the legal procedures required of the aforementioned victims to access administrative compensation, in order to verify whether there has indeed been progress in this area aimed at the effective enjoyment of rights, based on the comparison of the corresponding regulations with respect to the stages that must be carried out in practice for effective access to the compensation in question. This is due to the importance of this measure, which forms part of the fundamental right to full reparation, which in turn participates in a complex network of rights that underpin transitional justice.