The senator of Polo Democrático Iván Cepeda presented a tutelage before the Council of State against the president of Colombia, Iván Duque, for ordering the militarization of eight departments and 13 cities in the country, reported Prensa Latina.
The opposition congressman denounced that Decree 575 of 2021 constitutes the declaration of an internal commotion inasmuch as it attributes to the public force functions that exceed its powers and, in addition, violates the right to political participation and due constitutional process.
On May 28, when the anti-government strike was one month old, Duque, through the Ministry of the Interior, issued the questioned decree “by which instructions are issued for the preservation and restoration of public order.”
With legal protection, Cepeda seeks to order the president to suspend the application of the criticized decree.
Iván Cepeda denounced that Duque prevented the Congress of the Republic and the Constitutional Court from exercising political and automatic control, respectively, of the decree and the measures it brought with it.
In addition, he issued the normative text without the signature of all his ministers, failed to establish a time limit on its application, and refrained from indicating the reasons that led to its issuance, he stressed.
According to Cepeda, when issuing a decree of internal commotion under the figure of a regulatory decree, Duque ignored the formal requirements of the constitutional states of exception.
José Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective organization affirmed that with these regulations “the yearnings of an authoritarian regime that seeks to consolidate its political project based on the denial of democracy and human rights expand.”
It warns that the national government intends to put public order and the interests of privileged political and economic sectors that support the current regime, above fundamental rights and freedoms such as the right to protest enshrined in the Political Constitution.
‘This new norm is part of an inflammatory chain of orders that the government through its senior officials has issued against social protest, which has been given a war treatment, prioritizing repression over negotiation with the sectors social and popular unemployed ‘, he emphasizes.
He emphasizes that it is also a clear strategy to cover up an internal commotion, but also the systematic abuses by the police and joint operations between armed civilians and members of the public force.
The protection action is conceived in the Colombian constitution as the judicial means par excellence to protect citizens from the arbitrary use of public power when such use affects their fundamental rights and can be given by actions of the public power or by omissions of the same.
