E/CN.4/1995/111 page 26 80. Direct violence against representatives of the judiciary usually takes place in the framework of specific proceedings, mostly criminal, in an effort to ensure that investigations lead nowhere, that arrest warrants are not served or simply that responsibility for offences is not proved. This violence mainly takes the form of death threats and murders (since 1982, about 270 members of the judiciary are reported to have been murdered) and also causes corruption to set in. 81. By way of example, some authorities said that, for the 28,000 violent deaths that occurred in the country during 1992, the criminal justice system produced only 2,717 convictions, i.e. in barely 10 per cent of cases - this when dealing with the most serious of offences. 82. Although impunity affects the entire judicial branch, the greatest problems occur during the investigatory phase, which is the responsibility of the Fiscalía General de la Nación. Because of the high number of crimes committed in the country, its task is particularly difficult. In many parts of the national territory, the victims themselves or witnesses prefer to remain silent for fear of reprisals or react to the violations by moving to another region, thus making the investigator’s task considerably more difficult. Successive Governments should have taken decisive measures to confront this situation, instead of permitting that such a high number of crimes go unpunished year after year. 83. The Fiscalía General de la Nación is in charge of coordinating the criminal investigation police, which provide technical support for investigations and is made up of some 18,000 staff distributed among the different divisions assigned functions of this kind. Observers indicated that the assignment of the task of coordination to the Fiscalía General de la Nación was a significant improvement over the situation prior to the adoption of the new Constitution in which each judge conducted his own investigation and coordination was practically non-existent. However, the Fiscal General told the Special Rapporteurs that coordination had not yet been fully achieved. The Ministers of Justice and the Interior also insisted on the need for improving the investigative capacity of the Procuraduría. Non-governmental sources, for their part, criticized the excessively important role assigned to the military forces in criminal investigation activities, since they lacked the independence needed to conduct investigations objectively. In the view of these sources, this function should be performed exclusively by the technical unit of the criminal investigation police division of the Fiscalía General de la Nación. 84. Another issue about which the Special Rapporteurs heard repeated criticism was that of the protection of witnesses. The current Protection Programme for Victims and Witnesses, designed by the Fiscalía General de la Nación, is intended mainly for witnesses whose testimony is important enough to jeopardize criminal organizations. Witnesses in cases of human rights violations, on the contrary, do not always enjoy the advantages of such a programme. Officials at the Administrative Department of Security informed the Special Rapporteurs that their resources were limited and therefore they were not in a position to respond in a positive way to all the requests they received for the protection of persons under threat.