The Colombia Briefing | 2nd June

🗞️ The Constitutional Court has ordered the Colombian Catholic Church to de-classify its files on accusations and investigations of child abuse.

The church has often been granted high levels of confidentiality, but this week Colombia’s highest court has ruled that ministers and priests effectively hold public office, and that, especially in cases regarding sexual violence against minors, any claim to privacy would be outweighed, both by the rights of those minors and by the journalistic and public rights to information.

Journalists Juan Pablo Barrientos and Miguel Ángel Estupiñán had filed dozens of legal actions against various churches and dioceses in Colombia, believing there are up to 5,000 names of accused priests concealed in those files.

The two have been working on a years-long investigation into paedophilia and abuse committed by priests and ministers, work often blocked by church and archdiocese refusal to share information. According to the journalists, the Church had previously only handed over 13% of the requested data.

In the same judgment, the Attorney General’s Office was ordered to hand over similar files to a BBC journalist, who claimed that the prosecutor had also failed to adequately comply with information requests on the subject.

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🗞️ Two lawsuits against President Gustavo Petro and his government have been announced this week: the first was lodged at the International Criminal Court by Wilson Ruiz, former Minister of Justice of the government of Iván Duque.

Ruiz accuses Petro of "war crimes, crimes against humanity and criminal responsibility by omission," based on the Total Peace Policy, saying that approaches and concessions made to criminal groups as part of negotiation attempts, in fact constituted "a deliberate policy of omission that has strengthened criminal structures while weakening our armed forces."

The second suit will be filed at the Administrative Court of Antioquia by Mayor of Medellín Federico Gutiérrez - a complaint against the national government as a whole regarding hospital overcrowding and shortage of medications, as well as payment failures to health professionals.

The complaint mechanism hopes to force the government to provide more resources and guarantee care for the city’s residents.

Gutiérrez argues that government interventions into health providers, and consequent debts and frozen payments, have paralysed the system: he claims it is an intentional strategy by Petro’s government to damage the country’s health system in order to reform it.

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🗞️ Meanwhile, the President’s absences from public events are once again in the spotlight after he unexpectedly missed a meeting with Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino this week at the Caribbean leaders' summit in Montería, of which Petro was supposedly host.

Petro has said that his absence was a protection measure, following the discovery of rocket-launchers in a bin in Bogotá. The police said the launchers were not functional and that no ammunition was found, but Petro has declared himself unconvinced by their conclusions.

Petro’s absences were recently cited as evidence of substance abuse by former foreign minister Álvaro Leyva in his open letters, though the President himself says his non-attendance of public events has been due to schedule-clashes, health problems, and ongoing threats to his life.

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🗞️ The labour reform continues to progress through Congress, now with only one debate remaining until it becomes law. The bill was revived last month, and has until the 20th of June to pass in the Senate.