Human rights activism and the Colombian Constitutional Court: Judicial review of states of exception in the 1990s

Human rights mobilization in Colombia in the 1980s paved the way for the debates that emerged during the enactment of the 1991 Constitution, and the early discussions of the Constitutional Court in the 1990s. One of the most significant concerns of the human rights movements was constitutional emergencies (states of siege). In this chapter, I analyze how human rights activists realized, after initial debates and doubts, that constitutional law was a vocabulary useful to their cause. The human rights activists had to struggle against traditional positions that stressed the strict separation between domestic constitutional law and international human rights law. The struggle of the 1980s led to the adoption of specific provisions in the 1991 text and to a new sensibility in the Constitutional Court when reviewing constitutional emergency.