Papers - Conference 2009 - Institute of Latin American Studies

other actors engaged with the internally displaced. This normative framework wasdeveloped by the Representative of the Secretary-General on Internally DisplacedPersons at the request of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights andthe General Assembly. The actual Guiding Principles on Internal Displacementwere established by a team of international legal experts under theRepresentative's direction of Francis Deng, in consultation with a wide range ofinternational organisations, non-governmental organisations and researchinstitutions worldwide. The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement werepresented to the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1998. Since theirapprobation, it is assumed that they were included in the "constitutional block" inthe Colombian legal system, as well as the Constitution. This is an importantaspect, which increases the value of these Guiding Principles on InternalDisplacement that in other legal systems are not binding, but in that of Colombiahave compulsory force at the same time as being an excellent contribution toprotect fundamental rights of displaced people.At domestic level, law 387 of 1997 defines the desplazados as a person who hasbeen forced to migrate within the national territory, abandoning his/her place ofresidence or customary economic activities, because his/her life, physicalintegrity, personal freedom or safety have been violated or is directly threatenedas a result of any of the following situations: internal armed conflict, civil tensionand disturbances, general violence, massive human rights violations, infringementof international humanitarian law, or other circumstances arising from theforegoing situations that drastically disturb or could drastically disturb the publicorder. The Corte Constitucional contribution to the definition of a displacedperson is one given by case law T-027 of 1997: in these terms, the CorteConstitucional stated that the status of displacement needs to have two basicelements: forced migration, or migration without a person's consent, andmigration without passing international borders. With these two conditions met,there is no reasonable doubt that this is a case of internal displacement. The CorteConstitucional underlines the displacement phenomenon as a de facto condition,and that the government should prefer the expansive interpretation of8