Access to health care for Venezuelan irregular migrants in Colombia: between constitutional adjudication and human rights law

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the last six years, Colombia has received an exceptionally high number of incoming people on the move, fleeing from neighbouring Venezuela, including around 1 million Venezuelan nationals in an irregular situation. 1 Against this unique and challenging background, this article aims to ascertain the extent to which the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of Colombia and that of United Nations’ human rights treaty bodies and InterAmerican institutions are synergetic and supportive of the idea that the right to health must be equitably accessible for irregular migrants and subgroups of the same. The case law of this Court provides useful insights into both the difficulties of implementing ‘beyond minimalist’ approaches to the rights of irregular migrants in a middle-income country and the unusually influential but selective role of international human rights law and the comments of treaty bodies in its findings. For this case study, I also systematise applicable arguments of UN and InterAmerican human rights law and demonstrate that they are normative frameworks capable of pitching the right to health of irregular migrants beyond access to urgent treatment by integrating arguments based on core rights and vulnerability into a primary health care approach to public health that ‘brings promotion and prevention, cure and care together’. 2