Vélez Osorio, Luis Gonzaga, Another face of the Colombian adversarial system: disregard for personal liberty and criminal authoritarianism. Medellín, Universidad de Antioquia–Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Políticas, 2012.

Abstract

Another Face of the Colombian accusatory system: disregard for personal liberty and criminal authoritarianism, is a critical judgment of the blurred limiting potential of the criminal procedural rules that define the restrictions of the right to personal liberty in Colombia. It puts "white on black" the real scope of the so-called accusatory culture in the scope of the freedom regime, developed by Law 906 of 2004 and the reforms introduced by Laws 1142 of 2007 and 1453 of 2011. To this end, the study shows two faces of the accusatory criminal culture in terms of interventions on freedom: one that was called discursive or declared, which presents the "respect for criminal procedural guarantees" as one of the purposes of the criminal procedure system; and another, undeclared, which shows a divergent orientation, this time for the purpose of achieving "greater effectiveness in the fight against criminality" through the introduction of indiscriminate punitive increases, the prohibition of benefits, the increase in the requirement for subrogation and the expansion of the number of security measures. Thus, on the one hand, the study unveils certain lying metaphors of the official discourse on the exceptionality of pretrial detention and, on the other hand, in the aforementioned reforms, identifies the way in which the effectiveness of fundamental guarantees has been relativized as a limit to the state activity of criminal investigation, through the relaxation of the budgets and the very methodology of the interventions of the Prosecutor's Office and the Judicial Police.