The comments address the concerns of Human Rights Watch in connection with the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and the protection of fundamental rights of workers in Colombia. The comments respond to, but may also go beyond, questions 2 and 3 in the Office of the US Trade Representative’s Request for Comments on the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, published in the Federal Register on July 29, 2009.

By ending the double standard on human rights and democracy that marked US policy toward Colombia under President Bush, Obama could go a long way toward restoring US credibility in Latin America.

Colombia has for decades been embroiled in a brutal internal armed conflict involving left-wing guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN), paramilitary death squads (previously known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC), and the Colombian armed forces. Thousands have been killed, forcibly "disappeared," kidnapped, raped, and tortured.

President Barack Obama should raise human rights concerns on June 29, 2009, during his first official meeting with President Álvaro Uribe of Colombia.

Zimbabwe's armed forces are engaging in the forced labor of children and adults, and are torturing and beating local villagers on the diamond fields of Marange district in eastern Zimbabwe.

Namibia hosts the Kimberley Process Intersessional Meeting in Windhoek starting tomorrow. Namibia's Deputy Mines Minister, Bernhard Esau, who chairs the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), has a problem on his hands:  protecting the integrity and credibility of the Process and the international diamond industry.

Senior Americas Researcher Maria McFarland speaks to the US House of Representatives about human rights abuses in Colombia and the need to delay the Colombia FTA until such abuses are adequately addressed.

Colombia needs to do much more to address its human rights problems before the US Congress should consider the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives.