 Good afternoon, you're all very welcome. I feel sure that some of you will appreciate as I do myself the indication to switch off your mobile phones for the duration of the presentation. The event today is jointly organized by the Institute and the Normandy for Peace World Forum. It's a kind of privilege to the conference of the Normandy for Peace World Forum, which takes place in Cannes, I think at the beginning of June, the team of it being this year the peacemakers, which is very appropriate for the two eminent guests of honour we have today. Sergio Jaramillo-Caro, who is the former EU Special Envoy for the Peace Process in Columbia. I'm sorry, that's... I'm sorry, the former High Commissioner for Peace in Columbia. And Eamon Gilmour, who doesn't really need any introduction, what should be introduced correctly as the former EU Special Envoy for the Peace Process in Columbia. The organization of this will be that both Sergio Jaramillo and Mr. Gilmour will each speak for 10 to 15 minutes, and this will be on the record, and then we'll have a question and suggestion afterwards, which will be off the record, as to say, whatever you say here can be used by you, but not assigned to this place or to the speaker who delivered the question or the answer. The Colombian conflict we were talking about beforehand was a very complicated conflict, according to Lawyers Without Borders Canada, in the course of it, 265,000 people were murdered, there were over 46,000 cases of forced disappearance, there were nearly 7 million displaced persons, 28,000 victims of the kidnapping, nearly 11,000 killed or injured by anti-personnel mines, nearly 15,000 victims of sexual violence and nearly 8,000 forcibly recruited minors, as well as some 10,000 cases of torture. So, like many conflicts, its roots go far back. Some people talk about 1948, others talk about the 1960s, which is at a rate we know here that the historic roots of such conflicts are very deep. The peace process was concluded in 2016, was an agreement which was also quite a complicated affair, but then we have experience of this here also. As we were saying earlier, in one sense all conflicts and all the resolutions are unique, but in another sense and an important sense there are parallels and one of the important ones as far as we're concerned here today is the international element in the resolution. I say important here today because one of our speakers is our former foreign minister who played an important role. So without going any further on this, can I ask... Well, once again thank you very much indeed for this invitation. As we mentioned at lunch, we've been planning this event with Eamon for some time. So thank you to the institute and all those who helped. Sophie in particular who had to put up with all our logistical problems. I actually think we're at the high point of Colombian-Ireland relations because as some of you may know we now have embassies ambassadors. I salute our Patricio who is our first ambassador ever to Ireland. But also what some may not know is that Ireland actually played its own certainly not insignificant role in the peace process when we were negotiating in Havana. Some of your diplomats would come to visit. We had this great ambassador to Mexico and Colombia, Sonia Highland and the Secretary General of the Ministry, Niall Bergers, came to see us once. Always very interested, always very willing to support. Last year, no two years ago, we had your president come to Colombia, Michael Higgins. As peace commissioner, I took him to one of the camps where the FARC were laying down their weapons and he gave fabulous and forceful speech, encouraging them in their new life. But certainly by far the largest contribution that Ireland has made has been the contribution of this man to my left who has really played an extremely important role. Four peace in Colombia, but I think also as we were discussing at lunch in creating a way for the EU to be more effective in the way it engages with peace process. So I take advantage of the opportunity to thank you once again, Eamon. We, Colombians, really are all and will be all forever in your debt. So I won't give you too much background. You've heard a few figures already. I mean, Colombia was the oldest and by far the most violent conflict in Latin America. God going before the troubles. I know that one can underrate the levels of violence in Northern Ireland. When one looks at them in relative terms, they were severe. Somewhere I read that one in 200 families had lost somebody during the troubles. But in Colombia, if you just look at the force displacement, you had almost one in six Colombians being displaced. And all the other figures that you already heard are really horrific. The latest from what we call the National Center for Memory is a figure of getting close to 300,000 dead, about 80,000 disappeared forcefully, about 40,000 kidnapped, about 24,000, I think 24,500 massacres, imagine that. So it really was by far the most violent conflict ever in the Americas. And we managed to put an end to it after an extremely complex and intense negotiation which started in February of 2012 with six months of secret talks. I was head of the government's delegation then, and then we did another subsequent four years of public negotiations or negotiations that were known to the public. And in the process, one does learn a thing or two. So to get the discussion today going, I will just mention there are a lot of things we could say, but I'll concentrate on five aspects which I think are possibly especially relevant to peace process today that come out of our own experience. And I'll do this succinctly because we don't have too much time. The first thing I would say is, obviously the same sound, is that you need to, first thing you do is you need to structure a process. You need to structure a process. When peace agreements are signed, and it happens every so often, not often enough, unfortunately, you get the historians and the political scientists, everyone gets their laptop out and they start writing articles explaining why this had to happen. And I say to you, don't believe them because if you've been in these things, you realize that these things didn't have to happen. They could have gone this way, they could have gone that way. And a lot depends on one's ability to create a structure that channel things, that channels reality in a certain direction. So you finally get the Good Friday Agreement and people say, oh, yes, everyone was so tired of violence in Northern Ireland. Yes, but they were tired 10 years before and 15 years before and it hadn't happened. Of course you need conditions that facilitate, that make it possible and you may have conditions that make it impossible, but conditions on their own don't get you a peace agreement or a transition for that matter. If you look at the most serious by far situation we have now in the Americas, which is Venezuela, a year ago, exactly a year ago, there were very strong signs that something could be done and that there was willingness to sort the problem out. And yet nothing happened. Nothing happened because nobody had actually constructed a structure that took advantage of that moment. And what we have today is an ever more violent stalemate with, as you know, a million Venezuelans in Colombia. UN figures are over 3 million around Latin America. So mine is just simply a plea for the necessity to construct something. There's a good joke that Jonathan Powell, who helped us so much and whom we're so grateful, often tells from, apparently this is Schumann Paris in Israel sometime in the early 90s saying, we are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is that we don't have a tunnel. So that is the thing. You know, you need to construct the tunnel. In our case, and you have to do a lot of handiwork, in our case was beginning with communicating in a very disciplined fashion through the back channel which we did between 2010 and 2012, then doing six months of secret talks that aimed at a framework agreement. By the way, there were some direct lessons, far and remote as it may sound, there were some direct lessons from Northern Ireland that were used in the way that the preliminary work for the Good Friday Agreement was done and the kind of structures you can set up. We took advantage of that and some other examples. And all kinds of simple methodologies but ours were direct talks. We didn't want mediation. I'll say a word about the international aspect in a moment. And therefore we needed to be very rigorous as to how we would set this whole thing up. And suddenly you notice that things move forward and you're locked up in a safe house in Havana in a room like this with white boards with writing and you notice that the whole thing takes shape and you notice that you can build from that something even more ambitious and it is literally like building something out of nothing. So I am myself a very big believer in structuring a process. Now of course none of this would happen if neither side wanted it to happen and especially if you didn't have political leaders willing to take the risks. So without President Santos none of this would have happened because he had the vision and he took the risks. The second element I would mention is the need to put together a new narrative that manages people's expectations and that creates a kind of space within which the negotiation can happen and people can live. I myself attach a lot of importance to this and I say carefully that sometimes it's not obvious to me what the narrative was out of Northern Ireland because one sees sort of an amazing achievement and a recognition of its principle of consent but consent is not a narrative. Someone wonders what's the narrative. In our case the change was to say from the beginning to the FARC that on this occasion after and remember I should have mentioned at the beginning that it had already in Columbia three major failed peace processes three in a period of 25 years and we couldn't risk failing again. We said to the FARC, no this time we're not going to talk about peace in general we're going to talk about the end of the conflict. This is what we're aiming for the end of the conflict and around this concept of the end of the conflict we built this little narrative which especially at the beginning of the process was I would say very effective because number one it showed people the Colombian public that this was somehow different because the end of the conflict was associated with the end of violence was associated with the FARC's disarmament so it was like ah this is really going to happen and we actually got a point into the agenda for the first time ever in the secret talks with the FARC at the end of the conflict that included the discussion of the FARC's disarmament so people thought ah this is different and that was a big guarantee. Secondly and very importantly it was also a more modest expression than peace in general. It signaled that it was one thing to sign a piece of paper to stop the war but that building peace was infinitely more challenging task and that was actually very well received by the communities in Colombia on the ground because peace building efforts go on all the time and in a way people felt acknowledged and recognized in their work and they do to this day and I think it's good and especially Aemon will tell you more about this but given the enormous challenges of implementation of an ambitious peace agreement one better be modest about what can be achieved quickly but also this idea of the end of the conflict was not simply ok we're going to negotiate with the FARC how they're going to disarm because obviously no gorilla goes to the negotiating table to just sign up to their own extinction we said ok we understand the end of the conflict includes your disarmament but we also understand that we're talking about the historic armed conflict in Colombia and therefore we are willing to talk about those issues which we think have a direct relation with bringing a definitive end to the Colombian armed conflict and for that reason we are willing to talk about things like rural development or the issue of drugs that have fueled the conflict or the issue of political participation or especially the issue of the victims because there's an association between those problems and the continuation of violence in Colombia so it gave us a way of defining the agenda we were going to work on but even more importantly of giving a kind of conceptual direction of kind of polar start to what we were doing which was to say we are trying here to really attack the problem comprehensively so that we bring a definitive end to the conflict and it's not just about we can talk about that later it wasn't just about thinking about ok what are the so called root causes it was what are the factors that keep going and what have been the effects of this violence that we need to look at and that was the next point I wanted to talk about the effects and how to deal with the effects of the violence and by that I mean not just simply the great issue of peace and justice which we can talk about later on I'll say a word but more concretely about the effects on a society to suffer those levels of violence for decades and the conclusion one comes to is that a society that suffers those levels of violence for decades is a society that is traumatized and you need to face this you need to acknowledge this before coming here I was reaching up again on some things I have on Northern Ireland and I came across this paper by Irishman who is teaching in Boston who was speaking on the occasion of 20 years of the Good Friday Agreement and said the following thing he said with regard to Northern Ireland he said Northern Ireland will never develop to cohesiveness to integrate the disparate parts of its asymmetrical narratives of history bridge the socioeconomic faultiness or agree a common accepted policy without an acknowledgement on all sides that post-conflict trauma is of epidemic proportions and I read that and I thought ah you could have been writing about Columbia it's exactly but it's extraordinarily difficult for a society to acknowledge that is what's going on and that actually accounts for the behavior of not a few people so what do you do about that so what we did and what I always considered to be perhaps if any to be the main innovation of the Columbian peace process was to say from the very beginning of the secret talks we said to the FARC we need to have a point on the agenda where we're going to discuss the issue of victims and victims rights and this turned out to be by far the most difficult point to deal with we had to do all kinds of things from procedural innovations so we had conferences with victims in Columbia they would send proposals to Havana we especially with the help of the UN a university and the church we brought in five delegations of victims a total of 60 to Havana so you had a kind of life truth commission in the middle of a negotiation with victims giving their views on the peace process and what should happen and then we ended up designing what I would call the most ambitious transitional justice system to have come out of a peace agreement with a special tribunal a truth commission a special unit to look for the disappeared and with a system of incentives for people to participate on this which are normally described as incentives based on the idea of truth so if you tell the full truth of what you've done to the tribunal you have to use sentence under these conditions but you also have to do reparations you also have to go to the truth commission and various other things but it's not just and this is the point I wanted to emphasize I won't go into the details of all of this but I want to emphasize that the point here is not just the issue of truth in a normal academic sense it's the issue of acknowledging the truth that is actually the most interesting and most important the truth commission itself has its mandate that it should produce a report on the major violations that leads to clarifying what happened but also to acknowledging what happened and that is what you're beginning to see now in Columbia so we organized or we helped organize my office and myself as peace commissioner but not just us but various organizations of victims organized very formal acts where the FARC would go before communities and acknowledge the wrong they had done and ask for forgiveness in very very moving occasions the first was perhaps the most moving of all because it was done in a very small town where the FARC had by the way with some historically with some help of some Irish friends because the FARC after the famous three that were found in Columbia in 2001 got much better at cylinder bombs and that kind of thing so they threw a cylinder bomb in the year 2002 in a tiny little hamlet in the most depressed part of Columbia literally in the tropical conditions in the jungle and it killed 80 people mostly women and children and it was absolutely traumatic so they came back and the community itself organized this formal act for the FARC to go before them and acknowledge what they had done and I participated actually formally as well as the government and I spoke as a government but it was centered on the FARC and this we repeated a few times more recently unfortunately the political events haven't allowed that to happen but that was part of the thinking how do you start bottom up changing relations by acknowledging what happened and then top down you already have a massive discussion in Columbia around the transitional justice system because some people don't like what's going to come out of it but we already have evidence of audiences where because the system is designed there was one reason why the FARC agreed to do this they agreed to conditions that no other guerrilla has agreed to was because this was designed for all who have committed grave crimes in the context of the conflict not just for the FARC but also state agents police judiciary and civilians as well and you already have today in Columbia according to the press reports of senior military officials who were sitting in prison and decide to go to this jurisdiction and they're already telling the truth about what happened something that actually is very very rarely happened in transitional justice processes that the best known one in terms of truth is South Africa but hardly any state agents in South Africa chose to go and declare what they've done so this is actually working but it's working under huge political pressure which brings me to my next point which are the extraordinary difficulties and we're talking about that at lunch of aligning political identities with the peace process and in general what I regard as a great challenge of doing a peace negotiation in a democracy first of all because at a more general level democracies work according naturally they just reflect their publics and in a big country like Columbia where we had managed to reduce significantly over a period of about 10 years the level of violence by the end a very significant proportion of the population was no longer feeling the directs effects of the conflict so that actually constitutes a political problem because those who were sitting in the cities have an interest but they're not feeling it every day and I find that this is actually probably true of many other places if I may say so I'm not sure that people were living with what they lived with 30 years ago in Daria wherever anybody in London really felt any of this it was a different planet and I was just in Israel a few weeks ago and even the whole problem of the West Bank is next door nobody in Tel Aviv you have an impression that really is feeling the pressure of that situation well the more so in Columbia which is a huge country so that in itself constitutes a political problem but more concretely as we were discussing in any democracy that has a conflict of that intensity will necessarily turn it into the centre of the political discussion so that's how political identities are defined whether you're pro this or against this and so forth and it makes building a consensus around a solution particularly challenging in our case ended up with a very very strong opposition to the peace agreement President Santos we decided because it was a decision with the FARC to do a referendum on the peace agreement and as many of you may know we ended up losing by 0.3% in October 2016 by 60,000 votes out of 13.5 million but we lost so President Santos immediately went on national television and said we lost and this happened only three months after Brexit but with one big difference which was that in the case of Columbia those who opposed the peace agreement never said we don't want peace agreement we don't believe in peace it wasn't the binary situation yes or no stay in or out we have criticisms we have observations so when we lost we said ok very well what are your observations what are your modifications that's what they used in Spanish and so we proceeded to sit down with them for about a month and take note built together a document especially with former president who was led the strongest opposition to see what the changes were and then with that under our arms we had to go back to Havana and renegotiate the agreement which was extremely tough and I have to say the FARC behave admirably because from their own point of view all these changes meant concessions there was nothing good for them doing this but they were conscious of the gravity of the situation so we actually managed to change in our own count according to the document we built together issues that they wanted changed and yet unfortunately it wasn't it wasn't enough and when we came back we couldn't get to an agreement with the opposition and the main reason frankly and to me was quite obvious was that in the end there was a political discussion it wasn't so much about the peace process but it was an occasion to build a political base it was obvious to me that former president and had decided that he wasn't going to throw away that political capital but use it in the next elections which he did successfully with our new government so that's what happens when you try and negotiate peace and democracy those are the risks you run by the way I mentioned Israel and I'm struck that not enough people notice that everyone knows how difficult the issues are but if you see the Oslo process well what happened to the Oslo process was quite similar one got killed Paris very narrowly lost the election that was run partly on opposition to Oslo so that's fortunately our situation is better first because our agreement is much more comprehensive it's a final settlement unlike Oslo but also and this is the last point I'll mention I'll stop there because we've had so much support from the international community we discussed at lunch we took a particular view of what international engagement should be for us so we chose to use it very carefully at the beginning during the negotiations we only asked at the beginning Cuba and Norway for help because they both had experience of dealing with this kind of things dealing with groups like the FARC and by the way Amo knows that I don't lose an occasion to tell him and people in your government and foreign ministry that I think that Ireland that has accumulated so much experience because of the normal peace process and it's already doing a lot but in my view could do much more with that experience because really there are not too many countries that know how to do this you can get lots of people who get MAs and have full of good will but you don't have so many people who know how to operate in these environments and I know from a few that I've met in this country that you do so I want to strongly encourage you to engage even more forcefully because I think you have a very rich experience but just as we kept this kind of minimal strategy of international participation during the negotiations we were very aware that we would need a lot of international support after the agreement was signed and it was exactly at that time that Eamon came in as EU special envoy so he accompanied the end of the negotiation and started preparing the EU for what would come afterwards and I have to say this was of all the international support we have of course the support of Latin America itself was critical especially at the beginning of the peace process to get it going and to make it feel that it was something that was built out of the region but today the truth is that today the two most important factors that keep the process afloat in international terms are one the security council because the security council we agreed would send a monitoring mission and the mission is reporting to the council every three months and so everyone is aware this is going on and the second is the EU which has the added advantage of the political support but of having established a fund to which Ireland has also contributed virtually all of the EU members so this actually become incredibly important sources of stability in the aftermath of the signing of the agreement which I think are of critical importance today so I will end by thanking Ireland again thanking you for this invitation and thinking above all for his amazing work in Colombia thank you very much I think that was a very clear setting out of the political dynamics of the Colombian peace process from somebody who was sensually involved thank you very much thank you very much I can welcome Sergio and Maria and also acknowledge the presence of Her Excellency Ambassador Patricia Cortes Ambassador of Colombia it was around them sometime in 2015 Federico Mogherini asked me if I would agree to be the European Union Special Envoy of the peace process in Colombia you know the background Sergio and at that time she told me that it was expected that there would be a peace agreement I think there was even a date at that state it was 23rd of March 2016 the date that was set for the conclusion of the agreement and that my role would be to support on behalf of the European Union the implementation of that agreement of course it didn't quite work out as simple as that 23rd of March was extended I think it was August before the agreement was eventually concluded and then we had the plebiscite which didn't go too well and the negotiations which were described afterwards but I do recall the first time that we met and it was shortly after my appointment it was toward the end of 2015 I think and I remember you were in very bad humor because I think partly because maybe almost four years at it at that stage and understandable frustration but you had just been reading an international magazine which had been doing this kind of what 2016 is going to bring us and you pointed out to me that there wasn't a single mention in this magazine of the Colombian peace process and you said to me the Colombian peace process will be the good news story of 2016 and it was and I think because it was also it was why President Santos won the Nobel Prize at the end of 2016 and rightly so for it the other impression I had that those early meetings in Havana was the political commitment both on the part of the government of your negotiating team President Santos but also the leadership of FARC to conclude an agreement and I think without that political commitment on the part of the main parties and the negotiations it wouldn't be possible to get an agreement concluded and I want to pay particular tribute to and you mentioned it to the political courage and leadership of President Santos because without that the agreement would not have been concluded and it was not without political cost to him particularly in the latter part of the negotiations his approval ratings were declining very rapidly I remember one morning I think it was in June of 2016 and I think it was the date on which the bilateral the formal bilateral ceasefire eventually concluded and that part of the agreement was signed and I remember we were meeting before the formal event and that morning there was an opinion poll where he was doing particularly badly I had a certain affinity with this situation and I said to him don't worry about the opinion polls you're doing the right thing and he said I know I'm doing the right thing and he said even if I'm down to my last percentage point I will invest it to make sure that this agreement happens and he did I think it is great credit to him and to his leadership that the agreement was eventually concluded and that the situation after the surprising defeat of the agreement and the plebiscite the way in which that was managed I think was very important but of course he was going to go out of office and this time last year we were I think at this stage this time last year between the two rounds in the presidential election and it was becoming increasingly clear that the likely winner as it turned out to be would be the candidate of the party which had opposed the agreement in the plebiscite so what was going to happen to this peace agreement following the election of a new president whose party had opposed in the plebiscite again this was something that I think we had a little experience of because one of the things that happened here in this state there was a political consensus around the need to have a peace agreement wasn't quite the same consensus in the UK but I think we do have to acknowledge that you know while Tony Blair and Bertie Hernd quite rightly have got the credit for the negotiation of the Good Friday agreement that a lot of work was done by people like John Major, Albert Reynolds, Dick Spring in the years preceding that and of course within Northern Ireland eventually Ian Paisley and the Democratic Unionist Party came to work the agreement and at that stage to participate in the institutions so from the very beginning one of the things that I was conscious of was the need to have an engagement with the political opposition in Columbia Carlos Holmes who is now the Foreign Minister had been the Colombian ambassador to the European Union and he was known to us so we had early engagement with him President Uribe I had met here when I was Minister for Foreign Affairs sat beside him at a dinner he was here for an event that he had given me he didn't have a business card with him at the time but that he had written his email address and contact details on a piece of paper and I had put it away somewhere and I was rooting for it and founded and made contact again and indeed had a number of meetings with President Uribe over the period of time and with other figures including the then Senator Ivan Duque and you know had a lot of discussions about well what if there is a change of government how are you going to handle various things so when President Duque was elected we were able I think to have a conversation with him which was not starting for the first time it already built a relationship and a dialogue and one of the outstanding recollections that I have of my work in Columbia was a meeting that I had last October with President Duque at the beginning of the week it was there for a week and the first meeting I had was with President Duque he said to me he said I want to go to one of the ETCRs these are the places where the FARC ex-competence are living the kind of settlements where there are two, three hundred of them in the different settlements about 24 of them throughout the country he says I want to go to an ETCR and I would like you to come with me and I did a fascinating experience he was president from the side that had opposed the agreement meeting FARC ex-competence he was one of the leading FARC figures in the conflict holding a town hall meeting town hall style meeting with former competence about 300 of them I recall gathered asking questions of him there was a moment where there was questions and one of the participants complained that not all the questions were being allowed, that there was a degree of choreography of the question asking and the president said well I'll answer all the questions and he did and it was a remarkable experience and it convinced me much more than the statements that were being made to us that the new government was going to implement the agreement that in fact that there was a real commitment to the agreement and I think that that commitment I think has been reinforced and supported by the work of the international community you mentioned the security council the regular reports that go every three months a report to the security council and resolution and a statement afterwards and the unity of the security council in support of the Colombian the Colombian peace process so how is it doing largely positive but it's mixed there are difficulties there are challenges there were six chapters in the agreement probably the most comprehensive peace agreement that has ever been negotiated the sixth one deals with structures and implementation and that's largely done most of the institutions that were to be set up by the agreement have been set up are functioning there are some problems here and there in large they're functioning including joint bodies that were set up between FARC and the government to oversee its implementation they're largely working chapter three dealing with the laying down of weapons the issue of disarmament and demobilization the FARC disarmed within six months six seven months actually seven months they had completely disarmed by the middle of July of 2017 two years here from the IRA to do the decommissioning of weapons so remarkably quickly now of course they were just the weapons that the combatants had themselves next question is what happens the weapons that they've stashed away somewhere there were 900 arms dumps or callitas as they were called by the time the FARC had disarmed themselves two thirds of those were handed over to the United Nations monitoring body and subsequently they were handed over to the government so the arms dumps have been handed over the re-incorporation or the reintegration of FARC combatants hasn't gone as smoothly or hasn't gone as quickly as we would have liked there have been delays some of the productive projects that we wanted to see and for which we had funding available have been slow in there have been some fears that the situation there was a two year period which will expire this August where the FARC are getting a monthly payment that will come to an end what will happen to the ETCRs I think there is a solution to that and certainly on my last visit to Colombia I was encouraged by the progress that is being made on that but one of the things that encouraged me on my last visit was the post-conflict minister Minister of Stabilization Archila told me that that they had conducted a survey of the former combatants to see what did they want, where they were at training, economic activity and that of the 13,000 or so between ex-combatants and those that were militia and those that had been released from prison and those that were associated with them about 13,000 that they had got 10,500 respondents so I put this to one of the FARC leaders afterwards in a meeting that I had with them and I said look, government tell us that 10,500 of the former combatants have responded to this survey and he said no that's not true 11,500 have responded and I think it gives an interesting measure of whether there has been a lot of concern about what is the extent of dissidents that have drifted away from the process I think it's an interesting measure of the number who have actually stayed with the process and it's very encouraging Political participation was in Chapter 2 number of elements in that one was that FARC would be in effect gifted seats in the Senate five seats in the Senate, five seats in the Congress that has happened there is a problem with some of the participants because one was arrested on thought of an extradition warrant from the United States that case is still ongoing and a second Senator, one of the leading negotiators in Havana subsequently left Bogota and didn't take up a seat probably one of the disappointing things was that the agreement provided for 16 seats in the Congress to be made available to people from the areas that have been affected by the conflict disadvantaged, remote areas of the country, unfortunately and I think this was a consequence of the fact that the agreement and the plebiscite and everything kind of started to move into the election season unfortunately that provision of the agreement was not approved in the parliament and I think that's a pity there is a big provision in the agreement on participative democracy which I think is quite interesting and I think there are a lot of lessons that can be learned from it indeed not just in Columbia but in other countries Victims, the chapter on transitional justice is probably one of the most innovative chapters and innovative parts of any peace agreement the institutions the transitional justice institutions have been established there's a truth commission there's a victims unit and there's the JEP as it's called this is the arrangement whereby Sergei was describing it whereby people both in the FARC and people in the state system go before the JEP and say this is what we did and then based on their admission they go before this tribunal which has the power to impose penalties on them not in a conventional prison but it can include deprivation of liberty in 12 years I think for some some offences now that has started working the president said he wanted to make some changes to it didn't sign the statutory law that would uphold it proposed 6 changes to it they have gone to the congress and to the senate but neither the congress nor the senate has upheld the 6 changes although there is an issue in the senate about what is the threshold for that decision so I think from a legislative point of view that issue is probably resolved or in the process of being resolved from a political point of view I'm afraid it's not because the JEP is still subject to a lot of political criticism within the country and I think that is likely to continue I think there probably will be some progress on that at the point where the JEP starts to actually hand down sentences and actually make decisions and we haven't reached that point yet and I think that will probably change the dynamic meanwhile I think that the issue of victims probably needs a bit more attention victims have high expectations from the agreement a lot of what victims are looking for and I spend my last visit to Columbia I spent a lot of time talking with victims and with their representatives a lot of what they're looking for is not you know not big compensation they're looking for I mean a metagroup of victims in representatives of victims in Putumayo and what they were talking about was basically the commitments that were made for education for their children and woman said to me she said you know all we've got for our children all my child got was three copy books and a pencil and so there is work I think to be done in addressing the real immediate needs of victims drugs as you mentioned Hergill was a chapter in the agreement and that is a huge problem the crop the coca crop has traveled in recent years the main source of violence which unfortunately there is still a lot of in the country is coming from the drugs trade and from the armed gangs associated with the drugs trade and we've seen over the course of the last year about 180 social leaders human rights defenders who have been killed in remote parts of the country and many more intimidated and threatened largely coming from the drugs trade now within the European Union we've been looking at this and you'll recall we had an event in Brussels last year and I talked about this about the necessity for particularly I think in Europe and in North America for us to look at the drugs issue in Colombia not just from the point of view of the supply side we need to recognize that there is a shared responsibility for dealing we can't just leave this to Colombia and they can't simply be told you've got a problem with the drugs crop go and eradicate it that is not a solution to the drug situation I think here in Europe and in the United States there has to be a facing up to the fact that these are where the main markets are for cocaine and if we want to deal with the drugs problem we're going to have to deal with this on a shared basis with Colombia one of the things that we're doing at the moment we had some discussions about it last week in Brussels it's about developing some new initiative to work with Colombia on dealing with the drugs issue on a much more shared basis and then the final issue which is in the agreement is rural development and land reform I'm somewhat optimistic that the government intends to address the issue of infrastructure in rural areas and I know that President Duque has been having discussions with the European investment bank for example who have offered loan facilities to help with that issues around land reform I have to say I'm not so optimistic that things are happening or that the ambitions and the agreement are being met just yet anyway although there is a 15 year time horizon for that the two big issues that concern me at the moment in relation to the agreement and its implementation the first is what I've mentioned earlier which is the continuing violence by no means on the same scale that it was during the conflict and particularly at the height of the conflict but it is continuing in remote parts of the country this killing of human rights defenders and of social leaders and on my last visit because I was there also in my capacity as the European Union Special Representative for Human Rights we had the Human Rights Dialogue and this was one of the top issues that we discussed with the government. The second issue is the deteriorating situation in Venezuela and the consequences of that for Colombia and we've already seen very large numbers of migrants from Venezuela just to put it in context we're talking about probably all told about one and a half million migrants who have moved from Venezuela to Colombia that's a total number of migrants who came into Europe from Syria from North Africa in the height of the entire and it's into one country on its own the final thing that I want to say is to echo what you've said Serga which is to acknowledge I think the very strong support that Ireland has given to the Colombian peace process and that the government has government and the Department of Foreign Affairs have given this process the support for my own work through the procurement of an official to work with me in Bogota the work of Pat Colgan who is the former chief executive of the European Funds for Northern Ireland who worked with the post-conflict Minister with Minister Pardo for a period of time the fact that Ireland was one of the first member states to join the European Union Trust Fund the opening of embassies and Colombian Embassy in Dublin and Irish Embassy in Bogota but also the political support I was at the joint Iraqis Committee recently and again it's very encouraging that they're right across the political system here there has been support for the Colombian peace process but also there's been active support we've seen for example people like Jeffrey Donaldson, Mark Durkin Connor Murphy Monica McWilliams many people from the Northern Ireland process who have gone to Colombia and given their help and assistance and finally I think the work continuing work and continuing interest of civil society organisations in Ireland, trade unions churches development organisations who had an interest in Colombia long before even the peace negotiations began and that interest is continuing and finally in relation to the European Union's commitment to the process that continues one small correction on the introduction I'm not quite yet the former special envoy I've been given a new job but Federica Mogherini has asked me to continue with my work on the Colombian peace process until she can find a replacement for me in that capacity so I will continue working on it I'm very happy to do so