“Ten UN rapporteurs ask Duque not to resume spraying with glyphosate”, 08 March 2021

...Ten UN special rapporteurs sent a letter to the President of Colombia, Iván Duque, asking the Government not to resume the aerial spraying of illicit crops with the herbicide glyphosate, a plan that the Ministry of Defense wants to undertake in the coming months. The resumption of this program “would violate the peace agreement and against the provisions of the Constitutional Court regarding the hierarchy between the strategies for the eradication of illicit crops,” according to information published this Sunday by the NGO Dejusticia...These sprays, they consider, are carried out in “a context of systematic violence against indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples and human rights defenders who work to protect the right to health and the environment in the country”. In 2014, a ruling by the Colombian Constitutional Court ordered the suspension of aerial spraying after the World Health Organization (WHO) included glyphosate among the herbicides that can cause cancer in humans...However, the Duque government expressed in 2019 its intention to resume spraying and began the procedures to obtain the approval of environmental and health authorities…[T]his would suppose, in the eyes of the rapporteurs, “enormous risks for human rights and the environment, at the same time that it would not comply with the conditions established in the ruling T-236 of the Constitutional Court, nor with international obligations. in the matter”. And it would also go against a point of the peace agreement signed in 2016 with the extinct FARC guerrilla…