This Wednesday, Senator Gustavo Bolívar, together with the bench of the Historical Pact, A bill will be filed to modify the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences in order to strengthen the identification of disappeared persons.
The initiative, which will be filed in the course of the morning, will seek to convert Legal Medicine into an independent and impartial body of the Judicial Branch. In turn, it would have legal status, its own assets and administrative, technical and financial autonomy.
If approved, the entity would be renamed the National Scientific Technical Institute of Forensic Sciences. In this way, the efforts will seek to contribute to the search for the more than 120,000 disappeared persons in Colombia.
At the moment, Legal Medicine is part of the Attorney General’s Office, which makes the Attorney General choose the director. The purpose of the bill will be to give the entity independence in matters such as technical and scientific support for the administration of justice.
In addition, the project highlights that the infrastructure and capacity of Forensic Medicine is currently insufficient. According to the text, it only has 146 offices and 2,269 officials, which only cover 13% of the 1,122 municipalities in the country.
In turn, the project highlights the role of Legal Medicine in transitional justice processes in Colombia, since it contributes to the truth and justice that victims require. By identifying recovered bodies, the entity allows families victims of the conflict relief from the pain of loss.
According to the project, this aspect must be strengthened, given that the institute only has 7 forensic anthropology laboratories and 4 genetics laboratories. This, argues the government bench, has delayed the identification work.
According to the Search Unit, of 511 recovered bodies, Legal Medicine has only identified 11. In total, there are around 25,000 bodies in state institutions and cemeteries that have not been properly identified and, for that reason, have not been handed over to their families.
In this way, the project proposes to create an Office for the Identification of Victims of the Armed Conflict, reinforce measures for the preservation and conservation of unidentified bodies, give the institute an area of 5% of the cemeteries for its work and give it the direction of the Bank of Genetic profiles of missing persons.
In conclusion, the project, authored by Senator Bolívar, seeks to give the institute independence in order to give legitimacy to the judicial system and strengthen the search for and identification of disappeared persons.
“Colombia needs an entity with the capacity to search for and identify 120,000 disappeared persons, today it exceeds the Institute of Forensic Medicine and we seek to strengthen it through the creation of the new National Technical-Scientific Institute of Forensic Sciences, which has its own adequate infrastructure, budgetary and administrative autonomy when separated from the Prosecutor’s Office, which will strengthen its independence by correcting the imbalance in the accusatory system of the administration of justice, since the entity that provides technical and scientific support should not depend on the accuser, avoiding any type of undue interest”, Senator Gustavo Bolívar expressed regarding the project to be filed this Wednesday.
The senator is also preparing a reform project for Congress together with the Democratic Center caucus. After resolving points of disagreement, he is expected to settle in the next few days.
