Rewiring Justice After War
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos signing the peace treaty with FARC leader Rodrigo Londono Echeverri, also known as Timochenko (Wikipedia Commons)
“In ordinary justice, we victims were limited to silence. We could not speak; we could barely breathe. In contrast, in the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, we are the priority”. When Jacqueline Castillo spoke these words, she wasn’t just describing a legal process. She was capturing how humanity might start to heal after it has torn itself apart. Castillo, who lost her brother to forced disappearance, speaks for a collective in Colombia that has waited two decades for answers. In September 2025, they finally got something unprecedented: a court ruling that placed their voices at the heart of justice itself.
Colombia’s peace court (JEP) issued its first sentences for war crimes and crimes against humanity, nearly a decade after the 2016 peace agreement. These rulings are a crucial test of whether justice after war can focus on repairing harm and meeting the needs of victims while still holding those most responsible to account, thereby bridging the long-standing debate between peace and justice. This article analyses how the JEP emerged, situates it in broader discussions on international and restorative justice, and looks at what the first cases might mean for future transitions after armed conflict elsewhere.
Why Colombia’s Peace Court Matters
For over 50 years, Colombia’s internal armed conflict between state forces, left-wing guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries killed over 220,000 people and displaced millions. The 2016 peace accord between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas faced an impossible question: How do you deliver justice for such massive suffering without perpetuating cycles of revenge?
The answer the negotiators found can indeed be called innovative. They created the most ambitious transitional justice framework in terms of size and scope the world has seen so far, the “Comprehensive System for Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition”. It combines a truth commission, which published its final report in 2022, a unit to search for the disappeared, and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) as a dedicated court.
The JEP is responsible for the gravest crimes committed during the armed conflict, namely war crimes and crimes against humanity. Instead of relying only on long prison terms, it offers reduced sentences for those perpetrators who fully admit responsibility and actively repair the harm they caused. In contrast, those who refuse face up to 20 years in prison. This is more than just procedural innovation. It suggests a philosophical revolution of how justice after armed conflict can work that builds on the ideas and practice of restorative justice.
Restorative Justice in Brief
Restorative justice starts from a different question than ordinary criminal law. Instead of asking “Which rule was broken? How do we punish the offender?”, it rather asks “Who was harmed? What do they need? Who has obligations to meet those needs?” Crime is seen first as a harm to people and relationships, not only as an offence against the state. Therefore, it also assumes that offenders, under certain conditions, can be reintegrated into society.
In practice, restorative justice brings together those affected – victims, offenders, and sometimes wider community members – in processes such as restorative circles to acknowledge what happened, take responsibility, and agree on concrete steps to repair harm as far as possible, such as apologies, compensation, community work, or other forms of restitution. The focus is on repair, reintegration, and preventing future harm.
Until now, restorative justice has mostly been used in domestic or local settings like youth justice or neighborhood conflicts. Only in a few cases has it been applied to mass atrocities, like the Gacaca process, where a traditional community-based mechanism was used in Rwanda. Even then, it has usually run as a parallel process rather than a core part of a criminal court’s sentencing powers.
Beyond the Classic International Court Model
The modern model of international criminal justice emerged after WWII. The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals were the first international courts ever to charge high-level individuals. After the Cold War, new ad hoc UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR) and later “hybrid” courts for Cambodia, Lebanon, and Sierra Leone followed a similar logic: they identified those responsible for grave crimes and imposed prison sentences to condemn wrongdoing and deter future abuses. Victims appeared as witnesses but had little influence on outcomes.
Instead of relying on such ad hoc courts, the international community – pushed by civil society – created the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which came into being in 2002 under the Rome Statute. Victims can participate more directly and, in some cases, receive reparations, but sentences are still custodial; restorative elements sit alongside, rather than inside, the core criminal process. Thus, international justice has been dominated by retributive models: courts that prosecute and imprison those responsible for the worst crimes, often from afar and at high financial cost. Colombia’s JEP, by contrast, is the first tribunal for wartime atrocities to place a restorative logic at the center of its mandate and sanctions.
A Peace Court Built on Restorative Principles
The 2016 Colombian peace accord deliberately embedded restorative ideas into law. It created the JEP as a special jurisdiction separate from the ordinary courts, with its own judges, procedures, and sanctions. Its 15-year mandate is to investigate and judge those most responsible for serious violations during the conflict, while ensuring victims’ rights to truth, justice, reparation, and guarantees of non-repetition, drawing also on the work of the truth commission and Colombia’s broader framework for victims.
Unlike ordinary courts, the JEP works through “macro-cases” that reconstruct patterns of criminal behavior, such as a nationwide kidnapping policy or systematic extrajudicial executions (falsos positivos). Its three-tier sanctions regime reserves prison terms of up to 20 years for those who deny responsibility, shorter ordinary or alternative terms for partial cooperation, while those who fully acknowledge their role, clarify chains of command, and commit to repair can receive “special sanctions”: five to eight years of restricted liberty while carrying out reparative projects in affected communities.
Restorative principles also shape its procedure. Victims and their organizations can present reports, participate in hearings, and question perpetrators. It is this part that can be particularly powerful, but also challenging for everyone involved. Hearings are held not only in the capital, Bogotá, but in conflict-affected territories. Offices across the country provide not only access but also psycho-social and even spiritual support for indigenous communities. The JEP has dedicated structures to address gender-based violence, ethnic and territorial impacts, and the specific experiences of vulnerable groups. Together, these features turn ideas embedded in restorative justice, namely victim participation, dialogue, community involvement, and focus on repair, into binding rules of a criminal jurisdiction dealing with international crimes.
The First Rulings: Theory Meets Practice
So far, more than 260 individuals have been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by the JEP. The first real breakthrough for the wider public came in September 2025, when the JEP issued its first sentences against 12 people in two major macro‑cases. One, known as Case 01, concerns the FARC’s policy of kidnapping and holding civilians for ransom or political leverage. It examines more than 21,000 abductions and attributes command responsibility to the former FARC secretariat and mid‑level commanders. The other part of Case 03 addresses the so‑called “false positives”: civilians were killed and falsely presented as combatants killed by an army unit known as the La Popa battalion, often in collusion with paramilitary groups.
At a public event in October 2025 in Bogotá, JEP President Alejandro Ramelli contrasted the new rulings with past practice, noting that ordinary courts had issued kidnapping convictions but “not a single day in jail” was ever served, victims were largely absent, and broader patterns were ignored – “we had nothing,” and amnesties were the norm. The new sentences recognize that FARC leaders and specific military units committed crimes as part of organized policies, contributing to a more holistic narrative of the conflict. Equally important is that these sentences were built through dialogical hearings in which victims confronted former commanders, asked questions, described the long-term effects of abductions and killings, and helped shape restorative projects.
Those FARC commanders and army officers who accepted the full record of facts and their responsibility received special sanctions that required them to carry out these projects under strict supervision, while living under significant restrictions on their freedom of movement.
Limits and Risks of This Experiment
The Colombian model is groundbreaking, but far from problem-free. One source of frustration has been time. The JEP began operating in 2018, yet its first sentences were not issued until 2025. For many victims, seven years of investigations and hearings without visible punishment felt like a delay for many victims. However, the JEP faced budgetary pressure under former Colombian president Ivan Duque (2018-2022) and has now been hit by cuts of USAID funds. Some critics argue that sanctions are too lenient for such grave crimes, although this often comes from sectors opposed to the 2016 peace agreement and restorative justice more broadly. Still, the JEP has worked to meet international standards, and concerns in the ICJ report of 2019 about stronger guarantees for the participation of victims were incorporated.
Another challenge is implementation. Designing restorative sanctions is one thing; executing them in rural, often insecure territories is another. The sanctioned projects require land access, coordination among multiple state agencies, security guarantees for former combatants and victims, and sustained funding. Budget cuts and political resistance in earlier years have already shown how vulnerable the system is to shifting priorities. If the state fails to provide the necessary support, there is a risk that sanctions will remain largely symbolic, undermining both victims’ trust and the credibility of restorative justice sentences. The presidential elections in May 2026 are looming large in this respect.
Finally, the model depends on continued cooperation from those it judges. FARC leaders accepted the JEP’s jurisdiction on the understanding that, if they met strict conditions of truth and reparations, they would avoid long prison sentences. Public comments by judicial and political actors about the possibility of sending unresolved cases back to ordinary courts have already created tensions. If former combatants come to see the JEP as a corridor back to ordinary prison rather than a fair, restorative mechanism, their incentives to tell the full truth and engage in reparative work could collapse.
These challenges are not insurmountable. These first sentences are only a beginning, and Colombia’s restorative transitional justice model remains closely watched by the UN Security Council, the ICC, and other international actors whose backing could prove crucial if domestic political will and funding are fading.
What Colombia Adds to the Global Debate
Colombia’s experience with the JEP shows that the core ideas of restorative justice are highly relevant and can be built into a court dealing with international crimes. The restorative transitional justice framework of the JEP deals with war crimes and crimes against humanity, shaping everything from jurisdiction and procedure to sentencing. The JEP’s first rulings demonstrate that it is possible to place the voices and needs of victims at the center of a court’s work, to demand detailed acknowledgment from those most responsible, and to design sanctions that combine restrictions on liberty with duties to repair harm.
For international criminal justice, the JEP offers both inspiration and caution. It suggests that moving beyond purely retributive models may create space for truth-telling, meaningful reparations, and reintegration of those who once took up arms. At the same time, it highlights that such a system is highly dependent on political will, adequate resources, and the patience of victims and ex-combatants. The aim of overcoming the tensions in society cannot be overcome in a short period of time, but is a generational effort. Yet, the JEP offers one concrete way to support such a journey.
As other societies emerging from mass violence – whether in Ukraine, Sudan, or Myanmar – consider how to address past atrocities, the question is not whether to copy Colombia’s restorative transitional justice model. It is rather the question whether the philosophy underneath the JEP to “rewire” justice after war can be adapted to their own contexts, and how to ensure that the promises made on paper can be kept in practice. That is Colombia’s contribution to the world: offering a possible path for post-conflict societies to move toward peaceful coexistence.
As Jacqueline Castillo and thousands like her finally break their silence in Colombian courtrooms, they are not just seeking personal closure. They are also testing whether justice itself can change – from a system that punishes the guilty to one that also tries to heal the wounded. The world watches, because we have so many societies in or coming out of armed conflict that need healing.
