Nearly 1,000 human rights defenders were killed in Colombia between 2016 and 2025, UN says

(AFP) A total of 972 human rights defenders have been killed in Colombia since 2016, when the peace deal with FARC guerrillas was signed, the U.N. Human Rights Office said Thursday.

"In Colombia over the past decade, human rights defenders have been subjected to unrelenting violence, with an average of nearly 100 people killed each year," the agency said in a statement.

"It is heartbreaking that Colombia remains one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a human rights defender," denounced the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, quoted in the statement.

The office notes that in the time span studied, from 2016 to 2025, "more than 70% of perpetrators were identified as non-state armed actors."

And it adds that in the same period "2,018 cases of threats and attacks against human rights defenders were recorded," a figure that represents just "a fraction of the real magnitude of the phenomenon."

The report highlights that after the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC was signed, a "progressive increase in the number of homicides of human rights defenders" was "identified.

This has to do with "disputes by non-state armed actors in those territories that were left by the former FARC-EP guerrillas, and where the state failed to sustain a comprehensive presence to protect communities."

The report points in particular to criminal groups linked to drug trafficking, illegal mining, illegal logging and human trafficking, and charges "high levels of impunity and corruption as factors contributing to the violence."

The report includes a more specific analysis of the period from Jan. 1, 2022 to Dec. 31, 2025, when 410 homicides were documented. Of that total, 171 were peasants, 95 indigenous people and 42 Afro-descendants.

"The current government has implemented several important measures to address violence against defenders, but, as this report shows, there is still much to be done," added Volker Türk.