Judicial Review of Presidential Re-Election Amendments in Colombia
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Description
In the third wave of democratization, beginning with the fall of the Soviet empire, the roles of constitutional law and constitutional courts have assumed central importance in defining fledgling commitments to democracy. Of all the newly minted courts, the → Constitutional Court of Colombia (Corte Constitucional de Colombia) has rendered opinions that are landmarks in global constitutionalism. Two of those decisions, Decision C-1040 of 2005 (Colom) and Decision C-141 of 2010 (Colom) define the struggle to protect fragile democracies from descending into the unfortunately familiar descent of command rule, either from unchallenged one-party domination or the personalist rule of a single figure. In the first of these, the Constitutional Court upheld a constitutional amendment that allowed presidential re-election for the first time (→ Heads of State; → Heads of Government and Other Senior Officials). In the latter, the Court struck down as unconstitutional a new amendment allowing President Álvaro Uribe to seek a third presidential term (ie second re-election). In what follows, we examine both the doctrinal foundations for the Court’s crafting of a ‘replacement theory’ of political accountability and situate the importance of these rulings in comparative constitutional law.
Source Publication
Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law
Source Editors/Authors
Rainer Grote, Frauke Lachenmann, Rüdiger Wolfrum, Martina Mantovani
Publication Date
2020
Recommended Citation
Issacharoff, Samuel; García-Jaramillo, Santiago; and Benítez-Rojas, Vicente F., "Judicial Review of Presidential Re-Election Amendments in Colombia" (2020). Faculty Chapters. 912.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/912
