A/HRC/16/22 initial stage of designing similar procedures. No significant progress has been made by the Procurator General or the intelligence services in purging files. 23. Impunity and lack of democratic controls allow intelligence services to continue carrying out illegal and clandestine operations. OHCHR-Colombia continued to receive information on interception of e-mails, illegal surveillance, harassment and threats, information theft, modification of Web pages and break-ins into offices and homes of different civil society organizations, in some cases allegedly by members of military intelligence agencies. These acts, as well as those reported in 2009, remain unpunished. 24. Efficient mechanisms for independent oversight and control of intelligence services should be established and must be fully funded and legally empowered. In November 2010, the Constitutional Court ruled that the so-called “Intelligence Act” of 2009 was unconstitutional, due to formal flaws in its Parliamentary approval procedure.7 This, however, should not prevent the Government from expediting the intelligence reforms proposed in 2009. C. Extrajudicial executions 25. In 2010, the drastic reduction in the number of persons presented as killed in combat while under the custody of the Army, known as “false positives”, was consolidated. The High Commissioner considers it essential to advance in the judicial proceedings on past violations and to conduct an in-depth analysis of their causes, as a guarantee of nonrepetition. 26. The judicial rulings handed down to date8 confirm that these accusations were not false, as claimed by some politicians and members of the military. The National Human Rights Unit of the Attorney General’s Office is investigating 1,488 cases with 2,547 victims. More than 400 additional cases are being investigated through its sectional units. More than 448 active cases still remain in the military justice system. Moreover, an unknown number of cases in the military justice may have been closed without taking appropriate judicial action. Based on the available data on cases and victims, OHCHRColombia estimates that more than 3,000 persons9 may have been victims of extrajudicial executions, primarily attributed to the Army. The majority of these killings were carried out between 2004 and 2008. 27. The “judicial truth” behind extrajudicial executions, repeatedly demanded and supported by the Ministry of Defence, is essential, but not sufficient. Presidential sanctioning of the new Military Criminal Code in August was a positive step, since its article 3 confirms that human rights and international humanitarian law violations are not service-related acts and should, therefore, be prosecuted in the ordinary justice system. It is imperative that the military justice immediately transfer all cases of possible human rights violations to the ordinary justice system, and that cases that were closed by the military justice without proper investigation be revisited. 28. In this context, the significant decrease in the transfer of cases of persons “killed in combat” with signs of human rights violations from the military justice to the ordinary 7 8 9 6 Decision C-913-2010. To 15 October, of 125 rulings in cases assigned to the National Human Rights Unit of the Attorney General, 22 were acquittals. Estimate based on the number of cases under investigation by the Attorney General, plus the active cases and the uncertain number of cases in the military justice system, taking into account that there is more than one victim in most of the cases.