Gretel Mejía submits amicus curiae to the Guatemalan Constitutional Court
On the 29th of December 2020, twenty-four years after the signing of the Peace Accords, Gretel Mejía, Ph.D. researcher of the Justice Visions team at the Human Rights Centre, submitted an amicus curiae brief before the Guatemalan Constitutional Court on the international standards on reparations and victims’ rights. The amicus brief, available in Spanish, was submitted within an amparo action filed by the COCOP community, located in Santa María Nebaj, Quiché. According to the Historical Clarification Commission, in 1981 the Guatemalan army executed 67 members of the COCOP community, among them women and children, in the context of the internal armed conflict in Guatemala.
Last November, the COCOP community filed an amparo action with the support of the Centro de Análisis Forense y Ciencias Aplicadas (CAFCA) and the Bufete Jurídico de Derechos Humanos (BDH) due to the impact that the recent closure of the Peace Secretariat caused in their ongoing reparations proceedings before the National Program of Reparations. The closure, which was decided without consulting the victims, not only curtails their right of access to justice and integral reparation, but it also poses serious threats to the safety of victims’ personal and sensitive data granted in confidentiality to the National Program of Reparations.
Gretel Mejía, with the team of lawyers representing the COCOP community 
Presentation of the amicus curiae brief before the Constitutional Court
