Keywords
Forced displacement
Damage in the Inter-American System
Public assistance and reparation state policies
How to Cite
Abstract
Due to the recent judgments in the Mapiripán Massacre and Ituango Massacres, in which the Interamerican Court on Human Rights studied cases where victims were forcefully displaced, the debate concerning whether or not the public assistance policies can influence victims reparations, has been retaken.
In the Ituango case, the Interamerican Court noted that public assistance would be considered in the reparations study. Nevertheless, the Court did not argue the justification of this consideration, nor traduced that argument in to concrete
reductions Judge GUSTAVO ZAFRA ROLDÁN opinion in the Mapirián judgment was clear to note that public assistance should not interfere with reparations, due to the fact that assistance is not equivalent to reparation.
This article proposes a reformulation of the debate, to approach the problem from the concept of damage and not from the concept of reparations. We conclude that public assistance policies should influence reparations, bearing in mind that (i) public assistance can avoid the emergence of damage, diminish
it or interrupt it, and (ii) the purpose of public assistance is to cease the consequences of forced displacement. This subject can not be ignored by the Interamerican Court. To make possible the analysis, in the first section of the article we present the general criteria of the Interamerican Court in reparations and its relation to damage.
This journal is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
Approving the intervention of the work (review, copy-editing, translation, layout) and the following outreach, are granted through an use license and not through an assignment of rights. This means the journal and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana cannot be held responsible for any ethical malpractice by the authors. As a consequence of the protection granted by the use license, the journal is not required to publish recantations or modify information already published, unless the errata stems from the editorial management process. Publishing contents in this journal does not generate royalties for contributors.