Papers - Conference 2009 - Institute of Latin American Studies

communities): rights to territory (the Resguardos and the Territorios colectivos),right to proper jurisdiction in respect to the Constitution rights to doublenationality and to a bilingual education system.This new body hears challenges to the constitutionality of laws, legislativedecrees, laws approving international treaties, referendum or assemblyconstituency summons, and hears appeals of lower judicial decisions related to thetutelage action of constitutional rights (acción de tutela). The direct access to thejustice through the acción de tutela assuring the protection of human rights, ofinternational humanitarian law, the applications of the Constitution and of themore effective legal system. The acción de tutela, in others words the tutelageaction, was instituted as a quick and effective mechanism, which would allowcitizens to assert their fundamental rights as stated in Article 8 of the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights of 1948.This is an attempt to describe the most important concepts held by the ColombianConstitution, but it must be noted that the “fight” of Colombian institutions—inparticular that of the Corte Constitucional—does not always translate into a defacto tutelage. It is as if there were a gap between what is written as law and howit is put into action, due to different Colombian structural issues as given the openarmed conflict, the high rate of corruption that still characterises Colombia andthe insufficient government resources, especially for displaced persons publicpolicies.Moreover, on one hand the direct access to the Court is an excellent instrument ofaccess to the justice that a displaced person can choose to follow, on the otherhand, the displaced person sometimes is unaware of about the existence of thislegal instrument, or does not know how it works wand how to use it. In the worstcases, a displaced person does not even know to be a sujet de droit. In thiscontext, it is important to state the fundamental function provided by the leadersof displaced people, as sources of information and support to other displacedpeople. Moreover the free consultorios jurídicos offered to the displaced peopleby the pre graduate law students are very important in order to give to those22