The Supreme Court of Ibagué, a Colombian intermediate city, ordered Colombian President Iván Duque to be placed under house arrest for five days for failing to comply with a 2020 Supreme Court ruling on an environmental issue, and ordered him to be fined 15 months a month minimum wages. This, according to the decision, “unless compliance with the contract deemed unfulfilled is demonstrated”. So far, the Presidency has not commented on this. The Court also certifies copies of this decision for the House of Representatives, which is the only one under the Constitution responsible for evaluating heads of state.
The November 2020 Supreme Court ruling declared that a mountainous area known as Parque de Los Nevados in western Colombia is “subject to the rights to life, health and a healthy environment, the law of representation of which is the responsibility of the President. It ordered the head of state and other administrative units to coordinate to draw up a recovery and protection plan for the area within a year.
The judgment also asked President Duque to designate a group of armed forces or police to “continuously and permanently accompany the conservation work”, particularly in the area of the natural park in the department of Tolima. , because the ombudsman office had been warning of the armed conflict in the region since 2019. “Dissident factions of the FARC-EP or ELN,” says the Ombudsman’s 2019 warning, are “trying to retake territorial control over the corridors that historically linked the east with the west of the country.”
Some gunmen had come to threaten the farming communities in the snow-capped mountains and Los Nevados Natural Park officials. In November 2019, environmental leader Carlos Aldario Arenas, known locally for defending the Ruta del Cóndor, an ecological corridor for the emblematic bird of the Andes, was assassinated there.
“The court found that the President of the Republic has the express order to form a special public intervention force for the custody of Los Nevados National Park because of the numerous cases of disturbance of public order, trafficking in flora and fauna in a protected area. That order has not been fully complied with,” said Juan Felipe Rodríguez, the environmental attorney who pushed the Supreme Court decision in 2020, and also the ruling that now says the president failed to protect the state’s snowy mountains.
Because of the president’s jurisdiction, the Ibagué court’s order can hardly put him under house arrest, and the presidency can still appeal the decision. But the unprecedented house arrest case opens another chapter in the litigation being fought in Colombia’s high courts to protect the environment. After the Constitutional Court ruled in 2018 that referendums are not valid – citizens’ initiatives with popular participation to vote against or for a resource project – environmental protection has become an almost exclusively legal discussion.
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