Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has been sentenced to 12 years of house arrest following his conviction for witness-tampering and bribery, according to local media reports.
The sentencing hearing on Friday also resulted in Uribe, 73, receiving a fine of $578,000 and a ban from serving in public office for 100 months and 20 days — or just over eight years.
He is now required to report to authorities in Rionegro, in his home province of Antioquia. Afterwards, Judge Sandra Liliana Heredia ordered him to “proceed immediately to his residence where he will comply with house arrest”.
With his conviction on July 28, Uribe has become the first former Colombian president to be found guilty in a criminal trial.
But Uribe’s defence lawyers have already announced that they plan to appeal.
The sentencing culminates a six-month trial and nearly 13 years of legal back-and-forth for the popular conservative leader, who is considered one of the defining forces in modern-day Colombian politics.
His house arrest also comes less than a year before Colombia is set to hold presidential elections in May 2026.
Allegations of human rights abuses
The case centres around Uribe’s role in Colombia’s more than six-decade-long internal conflict, which has seen government forces, right-wing paramilitaries, left-wing rebel groups and drug-trafficking networks all fighting for control over parts of the country.
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During his tenure as president from 2002 to 2010, Uribe led a strong-armed offensive against left-wing rebels like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the largest such group at the time.
But that approach earned him criticism for alleged human rights abuses, which he has denied.
Under his presidency, the Colombian military faced increasing accusations that it was killing civilians to boost the number of enemy fighters it could report as dead.
This practice, known as the “false positives” scandal, has been implicated in the deaths of at least 2,000 people, with experts indicating that the number could be far higher. As many as 6,402 killings have been investigated.
Critics have also questioned Uribe’s ties to right-wing paramilitaries, another allegation the ex-president has rejected.
But more than a decade ago, Uribe took action to silence one of his most prominent critics, left-wing Senator Ivan Cepeda, sparking his current trial.
Cepeda and others had drawn connections between Uribe’s rise in politics in the 1990s and the creation of the paramilitary group Bloque Metro.
A legal boomerang
In 2012, Uribe filed a libel complaint against Cepeda with Colombia’s Supreme Court, after the senator launched a probe into the ex-president’s paramilitary contacts.
But in 2018, the case took a surprising new direction: The Supreme Court dismissed the complaint against Cepeda, and the court system instead started to weigh charges against Uribe instead.
Prosecutors accused Uribe of seeking to pressure paramilitary witnesses to change or suppress their testimony. While Uribe has admitted to sending lawyers to meet former members of Colombia’s paramilitaries, he has denied taking illegal actions.
Two paramilitaries have testified that Uribe’s lawyer, Diego Cadena, who also faces criminal charges, offered them money to give favourable evidence.
Their witness statements were also being used in a murder trial featuring Uribe’s brother, Santiago Uribe.
Uribe’s conviction was announced after a 10-hour hearing in which Judge Heredia said there was ample evidence that the ex-president sought to change witness testimony.
But that decision has sparked backlash from the United States, where the administration of President Donald Trump has shown a willingness to place political pressure on countries like Brazil that pursue criminal cases against former right-wing leaders.
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On Monday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on social media in defence of Uribe, repeating charges of judicial bias that have become commonplace under Trump.
“Former Colombian President Uribe’s only crime has been to tirelessly fight and defend his homeland,” Rubio said. “The weaponization of Colombia’s judicial branch by radical judges has now set a worrisome precedent.”
But Democrats in the US accused Trump of seeking to subvert the rule of law overseas for political gains.
“The Trump Admin is saying that foreign leaders shouldn’t be subject to rule of law if they say nice things about Trump,” Representative Jim McGovern wrote in reply to Rubio’s message.
“It is very wrong to support impunity for a strongman held accountable by courts in his own country. This statement is shameful, and you know it.”