What is the primary focus of the IV Concurso Universitario JEP 2026?

The competition focuses on transitional justice, specifically the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) in COL, and takes place in the city of Bogota.

Who is eligible to participate in this competition?

The competition is open to individuals at the college level.

Where will the IV Concurso Universitario JEP 2026 be held?

The event will be held in Bogota, COL.

IV Concurso Universitario JEP 2026

Nov 14–16, 2026Bogotá, ColombiaIn-person

Registration open

The IV Concurso Universitario JEP 2026 is an academic competition focused on transitional justice, specifically within the context of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) in Colombia. This event, held in Bogota, aims to engage university students in a deep understanding of the legal and social mechanisms for peacebuilding and reconciliation. Participants will delve into complex scenarios related to the JEP's mandate, fostering critical thinking and legal analysis skills.

Committees & topics

Topics
Building and Sustaining Peace in Post-Conflict Societies · Restorative Transitional Justice · The Universal Protection of Human Rights · Domestic Criminal Law in Transitional Contexts · International Criminal Law and the Fight Against Impunity · International Humanitarian Law and the Regulation of Armed Conflict · International Human Rights Law and State Obligations · Constitutional Law and the Bloc of Constitutionality

Why it matters

This competition is significant because it directly addresses the ongoing challenges and successes of transitional justice in COL, a nation with a recent history of internal conflict. By focusing on the JEP, it highlights the importance of accountability, victim's rights, and reconciliation in post-conflict societies. The event provides a platform for future legal professionals to grapple with real-world issues of peace and justice, which are crucial for the long-term stability and development of affected regions.

Furthermore, the Concurso Universitario JEP contributes to the broader discourse on how societies can move forward after periods of violence. It encourages participants to explore innovative legal solutions and ethical considerations in transitional justice, drawing parallels and distinctions with other international experiences in peacebuilding. The competition's emphasis on practical application of legal principles helps bridge the gap between academic theory and the realities of implementing peace agreements.

How to prepare

Participants in the IV Concurso Universitario JEP should focus their preparation on a thorough understanding of the legal framework and operational mechanisms of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) in COL. This includes studying its constitutional basis, jurisdiction, procedural rules, and the types of cases it handles. A deep dive into the JEP's role in investigating, prosecuting, and sanctioning serious human rights violations and international humanitarian law breaches committed during the armed conflict is essential.

Beyond the specific legal texts, it is crucial to analyze the broader context of transitional justice. This involves understanding concepts such as victim participation, reparations, truth-telling mechanisms, and guarantees of non-repetition. Students should also be prepared to engage with the ethical dilemmas and political complexities inherent in post-conflict justice processes. Familiarity with comparative transitional justice models from other countries could also provide valuable insights and arguments during the competition.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Colombia

As the host nation, COL is the primary focus of the competition, with its Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) being the central subject.

Role in topic

COL is actively engaged in a complex transitional justice process, with the JEP playing a pivotal role in addressing the legacy of its internal armed conflict. The country's experience offers a unique case study for understanding the challenges and opportunities of peacebuilding through legal mechanisms.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Building and Sustaining Peace in Post-Conflict Societies

The pursuit of peace in societies emerging from prolonged armed conflict has been a central preoccupation of the international community since the end of the Cold War, when intrastate wars surpassed interstate wars as the dominant form of organized violence. Peace processes in places such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Rwanda, Colombia, and South Sudan have demonstrated that signing a ceasefire is only the first step: durable peace requires disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of combatants, security-sector reform, political inclusion of former belligerents, attention to victims, and the dismantling of the economic and territorial structures that sustained the war. Colombia's 2016 Final Agreement between the government and the FARC-EP is one of the most ambitious recent attempts to operationalize the concept of 'positive peace,' combining a comprehensive rural reform, political participation guarantees, illicit-crop substitution, a transitional justice system (the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, JEP), and victims' rights at the center of the bargain. Implementation has been uneven, and parallel negotiations with the ELN and dissident groups remain fragile. Globally, the UN's 'Sustaining Peace' agenda (Resolutions 2282 and 2417) and the Pact for the Future reflect a shift away from purely military peacekeeping toward prevention and peacebuilding. Today the debate centers on how to finance peace, how to integrate ex-combatants without impunity, how to protect social leaders and signatories, and how to reconcile the demands of justice with the political compromises required to end hostilities.

Key players

Restorative Transitional Justice

Transitional justice emerged as a distinct field in the 1980s and 1990s, drawing on the experiences of Latin American transitions from dictatorship, post-apartheid South Africa, and post-genocide Rwanda. Its four classical pillars — criminal accountability, truth, reparations, and guarantees of non-recurrence — were consolidated in the UN Secretary-General's 2004 report on the rule of law and transitional justice and in the work of the Special Rapporteur created in 2011. Within this field, the restorative paradigm prioritizes the recognition of victims, the acknowledgement of harm by perpetrators, and the reconstruction of social bonds, in contrast to a purely retributive model centered on punishment. Colombia's Integral System for Truth, Justice, Reparation and Non-Repetition, created by the 2016 Accord and Legislative Act 01 of 2017, is the most elaborate contemporary experiment in restorative transitional justice. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP) offers reduced and 'own' sanctions — typically restrictions of liberty with restorative content such as demining, rural development, or memorialization — to those who tell the full truth and contribute to reparation, while reserving ordinary prison sentences for those who refuse to cooperate. The Truth Commission delivered its Final Report in 2022, and the Unit for the Search for Persons Deemed Missing continues its humanitarian work. The model is contested. Critics, including some victims' organizations and the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC during its preliminary examination (closed in 2021), have questioned whether restorative sanctions satisfy the duty to punish grave crimes; defenders argue that they better serve victims and reconciliation. The debate is shaping how future peace processes balance justice and political feasibility.

Key players

The Universal Protection of Human Rights

The modern human-rights regime was born from the catastrophe of the Second World War. The 1945 UN Charter affirmed human rights as a pillar of the international order, and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted under Eleanor Roosevelt's chairmanship, set the normative baseline. It was followed by the 1966 International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and by regional systems in Europe (1950), the Americas (1969), and Africa (1981). The Vienna World Conference of 1993 reaffirmed the universality, indivisibility and interdependence of all rights and created the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. In 2006 the UN General Assembly replaced the discredited Commission on Human Rights with the Human Rights Council, introducing the Universal Periodic Review through which every state's record is examined. The Inter-American system — Commission and Court of Human Rights — has been particularly influential in Latin America, developing doctrines on enforced disappearance, amnesty laws, and reparations that have shaped Colombian constitutional jurisprudence and the design of the JEP. Current challenges include the rollback of civic space, attacks on human-rights defenders and social leaders (Colombia leads the world in the number killed annually according to Global Witness and Front Line Defenders), the rights implications of artificial intelligence and mass surveillance, climate-induced displacement, and the persistent gap between ratification of treaties and domestic implementation.

Key players

Domestic Criminal Law in Transitional Contexts

Criminal law is the branch of public law through which the state defines conduct as punishable and imposes sanctions, framed by the principles of legality (nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege), culpability, proportionality, and ultima ratio. In civil-law traditions such as Colombia's, these principles are codified — currently in Law 599 of 2000 — and are constitutionalized through the bloc of constitutionality, which incorporates human-rights treaties as parameters of validity. In societies undergoing transition from armed conflict, ordinary criminal law faces structural strain. Mass victimization, command responsibility for systemic crimes, and the sheer number of perpetrators exceed the processing capacity of regular courts and challenge classical categories of authorship and participation. Colombia has responded with successive frameworks: the Justice and Peace Law (975 of 2005) for paramilitary demobilization, and, after 2016, the JEP, which operates with its own substantive and procedural rules while remaining within the constitutional order. Contemporary debates revolve around the relationship between ordinary and special criminal jurisdictions, the scope of selection and prioritization of cases, the treatment of third-party civilians and state agents non-members of the armed forces, the constitutionality of alternative sanctions, and how to preserve the guarantees of the accused while honoring the rights of victims to truth, justice and reparation.

Key players

International Criminal Law and the Fight Against Impunity

International criminal law crystallized at Nuremberg and Tokyo after 1945 and was revived in the 1990s through the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY, 1993) and Rwanda (ICTR, 1994), and hybrid courts in Sierra Leone, Cambodia, and Lebanon. The 1998 Rome Statute created the International Criminal Court, in force since 2002, with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and — after the 2010 Kampala amendments — the crime of aggression. Its founding principle, complementarity, holds that the Court acts only when national jurisdictions are unwilling or unable genuinely to investigate and prosecute. Colombia has been a State Party to the Rome Statute since 2002 (with a seven-year reservation on war crimes that expired in 2009) and was under preliminary examination by the Office of the Prosecutor from 2004 until November 2021, when Prosecutor Karim Khan closed the examination through a cooperation agreement recognizing that the JEP, the Attorney General's Office and other domestic mechanisms satisfy complementarity. This decision is a landmark in the dialogue between restorative transitional justice and the Rome system. The field today faces existential strains: arrest warrants against sitting heads of state (Bashir, Putin, Netanyahu) test cooperation duties; withdrawals and threats of withdrawal (Burundi, the Philippines, debates in several African states) challenge universality; and selectivity critiques persist. At the same time, universal jurisdiction trials in Europe over Syria, and accountability initiatives for Ukraine and Gaza, are expanding the operational reach of the discipline.

Key players

International Humanitarian Law and the Regulation of Armed Conflict

International humanitarian law (IHL), or the law of armed conflict, seeks to limit the effects of war for humanitarian reasons. Its modern foundations lie in the 1864 Geneva Convention, inspired by Henry Dunant after Solferino, and were consolidated in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977 and 2005. IHL distinguishes between international armed conflicts and non-international armed conflicts (governed primarily by Common Article 3 and Additional Protocol II), and rests on the cardinal principles of distinction, proportionality, precaution, humanity, and military necessity. Colombia's internal armed conflict — among the longest in the contemporary world — has been a paradigmatic laboratory for the application of IHL to non-international conflicts, including the protection of the civilian population, the prohibition of recruitment of minors, the regulation of antipersonnel mines (Ottawa Convention, ratified by Colombia in 2000), and the qualification of conduct as war crimes for purposes of transitional adjudication. The Constitutional Court has held that IHL is part of the bloc of constitutionality and binds all parties to the conflict, state and non-state alike. Contemporary challenges include urban warfare and the protection of essential infrastructure, the conduct of hostilities in cyberspace, autonomous weapons systems, the proliferation of non-state armed groups with fluid command structures, the protection of humanitarian and medical personnel, and serious violations documented in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and the Sahel. The ICRC, as custodian of the Conventions, continues to lead clarification efforts on customary IHL.

Key players

International Human Rights Law and State Obligations

International human rights law (IHRL) is the body of treaty and customary norms that governs the relationship between states and persons under their jurisdiction. It is built around the International Bill of Human Rights — the 1948 Universal Declaration and the two 1966 Covenants — complemented by specialized treaties on racial discrimination (1965), women (CEDAW, 1979), torture (1984), the child (1989), migrant workers (1990), enforced disappearance (2006), and persons with disabilities (2006). Regional systems in Europe, the Americas, and Africa provide judicial enforcement. Unlike IHL, IHRL applies at all times, although certain rights may be derogated in declared states of emergency and others (life, prohibition of torture, slavery, non-retroactivity) are non-derogable. The complementarity between IHRL and IHL in situations of armed conflict — confirmed by the ICJ in its Wall and Nuclear Weapons advisory opinions — is central to transitional contexts: the same fact may constitute a war crime under IHL and a human-rights violation engaging state responsibility under IHRL. The Inter-American Court's jurisprudence on enforced disappearance, extrajudicial executions, amnesty laws (Barrios Altos, Almonacid Arellano, Gelman) and reparations is binding on Colombia and has shaped the design of the JEP. Current debates concern extraterritorial application of human-rights obligations, business and human rights (UN Guiding Principles, 2011), the right to a healthy environment (recognized by the UNGA in 2022), and accountability for systemic violations against social leaders, indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant communities.

Key players

Constitutional Law and the Bloc of Constitutionality

Constitutional law organizes the exercise of public power and protects fundamental rights. The wave of Latin American constitutionalism that followed the transitions of the 1980s and 1990s — exemplified by Brazil 1988, Colombia 1991, Ecuador 2008, and Bolivia 2009 — produced extensive bills of rights, strong constitutional courts, the tutela/amparo action, and the doctrine of the bloc of constitutionality, by which human-rights treaties enjoy constitutional rank. Colombia's 1991 Constitution, drafted by a Constituent Assembly that included demobilized members of the M-19, is a paradigmatic 'transformative constitution' designed both to consolidate democracy and to pacify a divided society. The Constitutional Court of Colombia has developed an influential jurisprudence on the social and ecological state of law, the unconstitutional state of affairs (declared for internally displaced persons in T-025 of 2004 and for the prison system), the rights of indigenous peoples and Afro-descendant communities, and the constitutional review of the peace process itself. Legislative Acts 01 and 02 of 2017 incorporated the Final Accord and the JEP into the constitutional order, and the Court has ruled repeatedly on the limits of constitutional replacement and on the relationship between constitutional review and international obligations. Current debates concern the balance between popular sovereignty and counter-majoritarian review, the use of state-of-exception powers, the constitutional protection of the environment and future generations, judicial independence in the face of political pressure, and how constitutional courts should mediate between domestic law, IHL, IHRL, and international criminal law in transitional settings.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for IV Concurso Universitario JEP 2026.

CI
Concurso Internacional de Semilleros de Derecho Procesal 2026
Sep 21–25, 2026Paipa, Colombia

Colombia College November 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Why it matters

How to prepare

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Concurso Internacional de Semilleros de Derecho Procesal 2026

Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

Concurso Internacional de Semilleros de Derecho Procesal 2026

Frequently asked questions