Lectura inglesa No.

Legislative changes of the popular actions in Colombia: progress or regress?

* **
María Lucía Torres-Villarreal , Paola Marcela Iregui-Parra
*
Universidad del Rosario (Bogotá, Colombia)

The 1991 constituent wanted to give collective rights and popular actions a preponderant place in the Colombian legal
system and therefore included them in the constitutional text, granting them an essential role in the materialization of
the catalog of rights and developing the principles of solidarity and citizen participation. The scope of these rights as
elements of the community and their progressivity within universal protection of human rights on the basis of the
interdependence of human rights led the National Constituent Assembly to discuss and draft the text of today's article
88 of the Constitution and delegated the regulation of popular actions to the legislator, who seven years later issued
Law 472 of 1998.

Since its enactment, said Law has been monitored and studied by the Human Rights Research Group of the Faculty of
Jurisprudence of the Universidad del Rosario, in development of the thematic agenda of the Research Line on
Mechanisms for the Protection of the Human Rights and is complemented by the learning and results of the strategic
litigation actions advanced by the public interest legal clinic, called the Public Actions Group, also of the Faculty of
Jurisprudence1. For this reason, given the series of modifications that have been taking place in the legislative scenario
for seven years against Law 472 on popular actions, sometimes supported by jurisprudential pronouncements, the
Public Action Group has conducted several investigations aimed at analyze the impact of these changes in relation to the
effective protection of collective rights and their practical materialization with the daily exercise of popular actions2,
trying to show if the spirit of the constituent is maintained or affected, as it seems that the current reflections of the
legislator and jurisprudence were reduced to a merely procedural debate, forgetting its origin and the constitutional
debates held in 1990, when they were created in the system.

In that order of ideas, giving continuity to investigations on the subject, this article aims to analyze the legislative
modifications that have been given to Law 472, specifically in relation to precautionary measures and the prerequisite
for filing popular actions, from the changes introduced by the legislator on the occasion of Law 1437 of 2011 (Code of
Administrative Procedure and Administrative Litigation [CPACA]) and thus demonstrate how these reforms end up
ignoring the importance that the constituent wanted to give rights collective and popular actions, compromising their
legal nature, their scope and legal, social and political impact, from the perspective of the protection of human rights.

For this, the methodology used for data collection and organization of information is descriptive, because it can be
oriented towards the interpretation of positive law and also involves prescriptive aspects, because the reasons why
those who apply the positive law must be inclined to that interpretative sense (Batthyány and Cabrera, 2011, pp. 33-34).
This scheme involves the identification of problems of interpretation in the legal system and an analysis of the impact
that this interpretation can produce. This means that, when analyzing the norms contained in Law 472 and the
modifications that were made with Law 1437, reflections will be made from the normative interpretation of these and,
consequently, the vicissitudes that could eventually be generated in their application based on the scope of the
proposed reforms (Courtis, 2006, pp. 115-116), without neglecting the problem of interpretation and application for the
judicial operator when facing two current norms and for the citizen that is left under tension regulations that put human
rights at stake (Ossandón, 2009, pp. 159-183).