Political constitution of 1991, armed conflict and constitutional control

Abstract

The Political Constitution of 1991, understood as the constitutional reference point of the practices and legal acts that the Government generates as an active part of Colombia’s armed conflict, has certain special characteristics that have to be taken into account in order to understand the difficulties that the Constitutional Court has to deal with when it puts into effect its constitucional control. This article is intended to be an approximation to the understanding of those special characteristics.

These characteristics suggest that the constitucional text is not the ideal instrument that would serve as a controlling mechanism of the actions of an irregular Government that takes part in an armed conflict. This is due to the fact that the Constitution vanishes, treats as an exception or “under-constitutionalizes” the fact of war. These and other conditions have contributed, when the Constitutional Court carries out its controlling role, to the rising of constitutional conceptions that foster the bellicose treatment of armed conflicts, having huge implications to the defense of rights and the conservation of the structure of contemporary constitutional Governments.