The constitutional court and control of presidential extraordinary powers in Colombia

This study analyzes the attempts of Colombia's Constitutional Court to control the abuse of presidential emergency powers in the last decade. After describing the dilemmas that governmental emergency powers pose to constitutional regimes and explaining some particularities of Colombia as a democracy under permanent emergency, the account focuses on the efforts of the Constitutional Court to exercise a ‘material’ control of the declaration of a state of emergency by the President. According to this legal doctrine, it is the duty of the court to analyze if the facts invoked by the government constitute a crisis severe enough to justify the use of emergency powers. The analysis shows that the court has exercised this material control in a quite strict way and has nullified several declarations of a state of emergency by different presidents. The study goes on to show how this form of judicial review has been possible in a country like Colombia, with a precarious democracy and a cruel armed conflict. It describes also the impact of this form of judicial control in Colombian politics and offers some more general conclusions based on Colombian experience.