Rights In Colombia Research Articles

Rights of nature, an ornamental legal framework: water extractivism and backbone rivers with rights in Colombia

ABSTRACT Rivers have been at the centre of judicialization processes that have forged post-human legal experiments, gaining new rights, personhood, and legal agency. This article interrogates river rights jurisprudence through discourse analysis and using my engagement as situated researcher, revealing the positionality of rivers in the configuration of extractive regimes and contributing to the conceptualization of ‘water extractivism’. I argue that the enshrinement of rights to watercourses has become an ornamental legal framework that doesn't dismantle the private law ‘legal arrangements’ that provide stability and fluidity to extractive projects and interests that still take precedence over human and non-human rights.

Indigenous autonomy and decentralization in Colombia's quest for peace

AbstractColombia's constitution recognizes territorial autonomy as an inalienable right of its indigenous peoples, much like other countries across Latin America. Yet, for indigenous people exercising those rights, Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world. Why do states grant extensive rights to indigenous peoples and then fail to uphold them? This article approaches that question through an analysis of decentralization amid Colombia's armed conflict. It examines how crises that prompted a decentralization of governance during the conflict created political opportunities for indigenous rights in Colombia. Subsequent shifts in the conflict, however, including competition for control of extractive industries, put indigenous autonomy at odds with all the conflicting parties' interests. To resolve these challenges, the article suggests that the politics of climate change has created new political opportunities for indigenous autonomy throughout Latin America. It calls for investing in indigenous self‐governance to both protect the environment and secure peace.

From Social Minority to Children’s Rights in Colombia

Abstract This article reviews the institutional concepts associated with child protection in Bogota, Colombia, from the 16th century to the present, and studies how these concepts merged with the neoliberal discourse at the beginning of the 21st century in the care practices that are carried out. The article shows how state institutions in charge of child protection base their activities on ideological representations that involve techniques of control, surveillance and punishment of domestic units, which are presented as dysfunctional insofar as the children are seen as vulnerable. The article concludes that this exercise perpetuates social and spatial segregation in the city to legitimise the governance of child care. Ethnographic work carried out in the period between 2012 and 2017 in the Centro Único de Recepción de Niños (Unique Child Reception Centre) in Bogotá, is taken as a point of reference for the analysis.

Environmental Justice and Globalization: Putting a Focus on Indigenous Peoples and Local Community Rights and Perspectives

The right to participate in matters of local importance for communities as well as for Indigenous Peoples are increasingly recognized. This article analyses the continuous existence of deterrents to environmental justice from the perspective of social leaders who have worked in the defence of environmental and Indigenous rights in Colombia, Peru and Chile. This article argues that community rights and interests are relegated as a consequence of notions of development that are solely based on economic growth. This lack of a proper balance between a market-driven vision of development with local and Indigenous perspectives of development is manifested in different obstacles to effective participation and could also be explained by post-colonial dynamics. The research identifies seven particular obstacles that environmental and Indigenous rights defenders face to make their voices and perspectives be heard, namely: a total denial to binding mechanisms for participation, lack of information and transparency surrounding projects with a significant impact to local environments, unwillingness of State actors to supervise extractive industries, lack of access to environmental justice, lack of recognition by local authorities, in particular of Indigenous representatives, deception to the agreements between mining companies and the local communities as well as bureaucratic practices and judicial persecution, stigmatization and threats to the lives of environmental and Indigenous leaders.

Protecting collective rights in Colombia

The defense of collective rights and the appropriate reparation of damages to victims is a recent development issue in the Colombian legal system. Although some legal provisions mentioned damages to an indeterminate group of people in cases of negligence, it was not until the 1991 Constitution that Colombia established the types of actions all individuals or groups can initiate to advocate for the integrity of their rights in the face of illegal actions or omissions by the State. There is currently no mechanism for groups to sue private entities efficiently that guarantees all individual and collective rights, akin to class actions. This scientific article delves into the multifaceted landscape of collective rights protection in Colombia, focusing specifically on the mechanisms and implications surrounding the deployment of group actions.

Estudos políticos e jurídicos para a construção de políticas públicas com uma abordagem em direitos humanos na Colômbia

This paper exposes the role played by the interaction between political and legal studies for the construction of public policies in Colombia by considering human rights approaches. The political and the legal, when shifting from the individual hierarchical sphere to another of complementary functional nature, weigh the construction of public policies with a rights approach. Exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory methods were employed to understand the theoretical role of the political and the legal in the development of public policy agendas, meanwhile, the methodological part was based on the directives, guides, or guidelines of public policies with human rights approaches. A review is made on the state of the art of political and legal studies for the construction of public policies; the evaluation of the criteria of public policies with a focus on human rights based on political and legal studies, and the role played by political and legal studies in the construction of public policies with a focus on human rights in Colombia. An attempt was made to resume the idea of putting rights-based approaches and political-legal governance at the service of democracy under the capacity of the conjugation of political and legal studies with public policies, rights approaches, and political-legal governance.

Secular State in Colombia: An Unnamed Principle and Right

The present article focuses on analyzing the influence of the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court in Colombia regarding the consolidation of the secular state and the protection of human rights. In this regard, we will examine how the decisions of the Constitutional Court have contributed to guaranteeing the separation between church and state, promoting religious neutrality in public institutions, and ensuring the free exercise of different beliefs and religious practices. Additionally, we will explore how these judicial decisions have strengthened the protection of human rights, ensuring equality, freedom of conscience, and non-discrimination in the religious sphere. From another perspective, and as an integral part of the development of this article, we will analyze how the tax exemption granted to churches has resulted in a contradiction to the principles of equality and neutrality that the state should uphold concerning religion. The research problem that underlies the respective inquiries and the process of theoretical synthesis can be summarized in two questions: What is the impact of the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court on the consolidation of the secular state and the protection of human rights in Colombia? And how has the tax exemption of churches become a historical debt of the secular state in the country? Finally, it was concluded that thanks to the jurisprudential development of the Constitutional Court, there was a crucial impact on the establishment of the Secular State by expanding the interpretation of its elements, scope, and undeniable relationship with Human Rights.

The marks of gender in the defence of human rights in Colombia

ABSTRACT The role of women human rights defenders in Colombia is fundamental. The conditions of socioeconomic inequality, gender-based inequalities and discrimination, and the armed conflict have been complex scenarios in which women’s leadership in the defence of human rights and peace have played a leading role. The creation of diverse collective processes and social networks at the local and national levels have been crucial strategies in the work of women defenders, their advocacy, and their forms of resistance. Their impact is undeniable. However, the work of women human rights defenders in Colombia has not been easy and has been frequently threatened. Hundreds of women human rights defenders have left the country as exiles over the past three decades or have been forcibly displaced within the country to protect their lives, many have suffered direct attacks, and some of them have been killed. The forms and impacts of violence against them have differential characteristics with respect to other defenders, which reveal the presence of gender stereotypes. In addition, indigenous, peasant, and lesbian, bisexual and trans women (LBT women) defenders face aggravated risks. Paradoxically, their visibility in the defence of peace has had very high costs for them after the signing of the Peace Accord between government and FARC-EP guerrillas in 2016. Women here are at a differential risk not only because they support the Peace Accord implementation in contexts where there are sectors that oppose it, but because they have gone beyond the low-key behaviour that is still expected for women in the political arena in many places of Colombia. Despite all this, they continue to lead the defence of human rights and their political advocacy has led to the creation of specific protection programmes for them by the Colombian state, the implementation of which is currently a challenge.

The Loving Embrace: Women’s Legal Mobilization in favor of a Feminist Constitution in Colombia in 1991

ABSTRACT What do women contribute when constitutions are written? How can they make their voices and proposals heard? Can feminism shape constitutional law? These are the main questions in the narrative of the feminist movement’s participation in the shaping of the 1991 Colombian Constitution. The objective of the essay is to recover the role of women in lawmaking while applying a gender lens to historical methodologies, by using documental evidence from the national archives and newspapers to uncover their actions and voices, as well as conducting interviews with feminist leaders in Colombia active during the 1990s. These findings show the repertoires of action of the women’s movement taking advantage of a crucial political opportunity to write constitutional law, as well as the obstacles and trade-offs they faced to advance women’s human rights in Colombia’s new charter. The essay argues that, despite the strategic feminist mobilization to include women’s reproductive rights in the Constitution, the political alliances outside (and inside) the National Constitutional Assembly between the Liberal Party and the Catholic Church blocked some of their demands, especially with regard to voluntary motherhood. The conclusions identify the feminist heritage of the new constitutional order that emerged as a result.

Recognition of nature as a subject of rights in Colombia: some challenges of its insertion in the legal system

From the notion of good living o «Sumak Kawsay.» the conception of nature has been rethought to understand it as a subject of rights with intrinsic attributes that required its protection. This vision has managed to introduce in the legal systems with reforms to the constitution or laws as in the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia or through judgments, as in the Colombian case. The paper gives a vision of the rights of the nature and how these have been incorporated in Colombia. After this, explain challenges of their incorporation in the legal system, related to the dichotomy of nature as a subject and object, the lack of specification of the rights, the atomization of the recognition, and the legal representation. Finally, a proposal is made for a possible solution to these challenges.

Plebiscites for peace and fundamental rights in Colombia. A historical and comparative approach, 1957-2016

This article analyzes the legal, political and historical nature of the plebiscite and its relationship with fundamental rights. The study has a comparative approach, of theoretical, conceptual and critical reflection on the plebiscite as a mechanism for legitimizing political power and, at the local level, on its connection with the search for peace. And he concludes that the comparison between the plebiscites of 1957 and 2016 is useful to show, on the one hand, that in Colombia the characteristic features of this mechanism in the universal history of the 20th century have also been revealed. That is, despite its foundation in direct democracy, due to the use that can be given to manipulate the popular will, the plebiscite can be useful for Bonapartist or Orléanist and presidential systems, as well as for interests contrary to republicanism and theories of democratic rights like those of Luigi Ferrajoli. On the other hand, in this country, with the lure of the end of violence as a background in both cases, while in 1957 the plebiscite was a complete success for its organizers (traditional political parties and military junta) who achieved overwhelming popular approval (with wide participation) of the exclusive political system called the National Front and one of the decisive factors of the armed conflict in the last century; In 2016, the real leader of the plebiscite was the then senator Álvaro Uribe, former president and head of the opposition to the government of Juan Manuel Santos, promoter of peace. Uribe thus obtained, with a weak victory of the No to the «Havana Agreements» and an abstention rate of more than 60%, a clear victory for his authoritarian and warmongering policy, a key approach to the electoral campaign that would lead his political party to the victory in the 2018 presidential elections and the consequent stagnation of peace objectives.

Spatiality, Temporality and Ontology: Constraints for the Restitution of Indigenous Peoples’ Territorial Rights in Colombia

In this article, three limitations to how ethnic land restitution has been carried out in Colombia to date are discussed. The specific restrictions that I mention are related to 1) temporality, 2) spatiality, and 3) to the ontology of the idea of reparations concerning indigenous peoples’ territorial rights. These findings result from fieldwork conducted in 2017 and 2018 in the Aponte indigenous reserve of the Inga people. The first section of the article briefly describes the history and functioning of Act 1448 of 2011, known in Colombia as the Law on Victims and Land Restitution. In the second section, I describe the case of the Inga people in Aponte, located in the department of Nariño, in southern Colombia. In the third section, I discuss the three limitations mentioned above regarding the land restitution process, followed by a conclusion.

Decolonizing local planning through new social cartography: making Black geographies visible in a plantation context in Colombia

ABSTRACT Maps produced during the saga of European ‘discovery’ were shown to erase local forms of spatial knowledge of colonised populations to serve domination interests. This paper explores the continuation of this colonial erasing logic in local planning practices in Jamundí, a municipality where Black peasants’ traditional farms persist in a sugarcane dominated landscape. We first compare official maps from the current Land Use Plan of Jamundí with social cartography produced by afro-descendant community councils to analyse the maps’ selections, omissions and additions. Through community map drawings and collective discussions during cartography workshops, interviews and tours of the territory, we then reconstruct a Black geography that is concealed in official maps. Our analysis shows that official maps naturalise a scale in which only plantations are formally represented, rendering invisible small-scale traditional agricultural systems and Black ecologies, favouring the expansion of uses and activities detrimental to Black territorial projects in Jamundí. We argue that afro-descendant living spaces and experiences are visually omitted from spatial representation in the physical planning maps through institutionalised processes. We conclude that decolonising local planning is crucial for the recognition and securing of afro-descendant customary land and territorial rights in Colombia as well as for regional sustainability.

Legal Threats and the Emergence of Legal Mobilization: Conservative Mobilization in Colombia

Though the Colombian Constitutional Court has had a lead role in granting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) rights since 1998, conservatives mobilizing against LGBT rights between 1991 and 2007 were active in Congress and the streets rather than in court. After 2007, however, conservatives have maintained consistent opposition to rights claims made by LGBT people in the Constitutional Court. This article draws from fieldwork examining the significance of the Constitutional Court’s transition from granting rights to LGBT people as individuals to granting rights to LGBT people as couples and potential families to theorize conservative legal mobilization, particularly moral conservatism. To account for the rise of conservative legal mobilization against LGBT rights in Colombia in 2007, this article expands on the legal opportunity structure model. It theorizes that legal threats––that is, changes in legal rules that are perceived to increase the costs of mobilization or the expected costs of not taking action––are among the factors that lead movements to engage in legal mobilization, even if legal opportunities are not expanding.

Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia

Managing Multiculturalism: Indigeneity and the Struggle for Rights in Colombia

Gill, Lesley. A century of violence in a red city: popular struggle, counterinsurgency, and human rights in Colombia. xiv, 287 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2016. £18.99 (paper)

Gill, Lesley. A century of violence in a red city: popular struggle, counterinsurgency, and human rights in Colombia. xiv, 287 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2016. £18.99 (paper)

On the Social Construction of Legal Grievances: Evidence From Colombia and South Africa

Leveraging comparisons within and across cases, this article investigates legal mobilization for social rights in Colombia and South Africa. This kind of rights contestation represents a new phenomenon, in which both ordinary citizens and judicial actors have come to view problems related to access to health care, housing, education, and social security through the lens of the law. Research on legal mobilization has tended toward one-sided examinations of this complex phenomenon, focusing primarily on either legal claims-making or judicial decision-making, and neglecting to fully theorize the relationship between the two. Drawing on an analysis of rights claims and 178 interviews, this article aims to correct these imbalances. In doing so, it offers a generalizable model that accounts for the social construction of legal grievances and the development of judicial receptivity to particular kinds of claims, and explains both the emergence and continuation of legal mobilization for social rights.

Die gerichtliche Anerkennung der Natur als Gegenstand von Rechten als Antwort auf die Lösung von Umweltproblemen in Kolumbien: Die Erweiterung der Gruppe, der Rechte zustehen

Granting legal rights to nature in Colombia has opened the discussion about new approaches to justice where nature is also an actor, a subject. This kind of judicial recognition raises questions about the broadening of the circle of justice to include non-human beings and about the classical concept of environmental justice, which focus mainly on activities’ impacts on humans. In this paper I reflect about the basics of the category of nature as a subject of rights in Colombia, and the notion of justice embedded in the rulings examined. Using the doctrinal method, the analysis is based on the study of six rulings that recognised rights of rivers and ecosystems in Colombia, issued by judges from the Constitutional Court as well as the municipal courts between 2016 and 2019.

Lusophone Studies: A Cumulative Area Bibliography, 2017–19

Portuguese Studies vol. 36 no. 1 (2020), 67–95© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 Lusophone Studies: A Cumulative Area Bibliography, 2017–19 Emilce Rees King’s College, London The following pages list publications and doctoral theses relating to the Portuguese-speaking world which were published from late 2017 to mid-2019 in English. Some MA theses have been included and some 2016 publications. Online academic databases have been used, namely the Copac(r) library catalogue, WorldCat(r), the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Database and the British Library EThOS for theses produced by UK Higher Education. The Copac(r) library catalogue contains the merged online catalogues of major University, Specialist, and National Libraries in the UK and Ireland, including the British Library. ABIL (Association of Portuguese and Irish Lusitanists) list members are also thanked for their contribution. WorldCat(r) is a global catalogue with over 2 billion items available from libraries around the world. I. Publications 1.1 Anthropology, Ethnography and Folklore 1.2 Arts, Architecture and Music 1.3 Bibliographies, Directories and Guides 1.4 Environment 1.5 History, Politics and Social Science 1.6 Language 1.7 Literature 1.8 Religion II. Theses 2.1 African Topics 2.2 Asian Topics 2.3 Brazilian Topics 2.4 Portuguese Topics Bibliography 68 I. Publications 1.1 Anthropology, Ethnography and Folklore ANDERSON, Warwick, Ricardo ROQUE & Ricardo VENTURA SANTOS (eds), Luso-Tropicalism and its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 346 pages. BALL, Christopher Gordon, Exchanging Words: Language, Ritual, and Relationality in Brazil’s Xingu Indigenous Park (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press/SAR Press, 2018), xiii, 274 pages. BEACH, Dennis, Carl BAGLEY & Sofia MARQUES DA SILVA, The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), xvii, 574 pages. COSTA, Luiz, The Owners of Kinship: Asymmetrical Relations in Indigenous Amazonia (Chicago, IL: HAU Books, 2017), 304 pages. COSTA VARGAS, João Helion, The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 352 pages. DA-GLORIA, Pedro, Walter A. NEVES & Mark HUBBE (eds), Archaeological and Paleontological Research in Lagoa Santa: The Quest for the First Americans (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), xvi, 401 pages. DE LA TORRE, Oscar, The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 242 pages. GONZÁLEZ VARELA, Sérgio Armando, Capoeira, Mobility, and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 184 pages. KUTESKO, Elizabeth, Fashioning Brazil: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in ‘National Geographic’ (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), xv, 197 pages. MITCHELL, Gladys L., The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xvi, 266 pages. MURPHY, Timothy Eugene, Queerly Cosmopolitan: Bohemia and Belonging in a Brazilian Middle-of-Nowhere City (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), xiv, 157 pages. OLIVEIRA-MONTE, Emanuelle K. F., Barack Obama is Brazilian: (Re)Signifying Race Relations in Contemporary Brazil (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 226 pages. PASCHEL, Tianna S., Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and EthnoRacial Rights in Colombia and Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 328 pages. SHULIST, Sarah, Transforming Indigeneity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian Amazon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), xiv, 241 pages. VARELA, Sérgio González, Power in Practice: The Pragmatic Anthropology of Afro-Brazilian Capoeira (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 182 pages. Bibliography 69 1.2 Arts, Architecture and Music ALLEN, Alice Louisa, Shifting Horizons: Urban Space and Social Difference in Contemporary Brazilian Documentary and Photography (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 284 pages. ANTUNES, Joana, Maria de Lurdes CRAVEIRO & Carla Alexandra GONÇALVES, The Centre as Margin: Eccentric Perspectives on Art (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2019), xxxii, 330 pages. BABAIE, Sussan & Melanie GIBSON, The Mercantile Effect: Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World during the 17th and 18th Centuries (London: Gingko Library, 2017), 143 pages. BAMFORD, Heather, Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), xi, 257 pages. BAYMAN, Louis & Natália PINAZZA, Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics, Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), xii, 304 pages. BENNETT, Andy & Paula GUERRA, DIY Cultures and...

Personal reflections 25 years after the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo

Personal reflections 25 years after the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo