Abstract

MIRA GONZALEZ, Clara María. State of Emergency in Colombia and Application of the Proportionality Principle: Analysis of Six Representative Cases. Opin. jurid. [online]. 2016, vol.15, n.29, pp.141-163. ISSN 1692-2530.

This article accounts for the way proportionality principles have been executed in Colombia for the control of constitutionality of the states of emergency, through the evaluation of six (6) special cases from 1991, four (4) of them related to internal states of exception and two (2) of them related to social emergency. A qualitative methodology was used to describe the way the Constitutional Court was applying the proportionality principle to analyze such exceptions, accounting for an analysis matrix that describes the key points of such principle, to wit: a) the existence of a special crisis and not of a structural damage to the states of exception; b) not suspension of human rights or basic freedom of people over which measures are imposed; c) not interruption of the normal operation of the government branches; d) the exercise of powers exclusively to effectively face abnormalities; the strict relationship between cause and abnormality and, in this sense, the direction of decrees only and exclusively to resolve the causes that give origin to the state of exception; e) the length defined for the states of exception (Cifuentes, 2002) to conclude that the Constitutional Court, while applying the proportionality principle, has failed to make an exhaustive judgment of the requirements incorporated; in this way, it has allowed a perpetuation of the executive power and a government with no separation of powers.

Keywords : States of exception; justice management crisis; economic; social; and ecological crisis; abnormality; political constitution.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )