Colombia

Abstract Unlike the other countries analyzed in this book, Colombia had little experience with refugees and asylum-seekers until very recently. For most of its history, Colombia has been a country of emigration rather than immigration. As a result, it was ill-prepared for the unprecedented number of Venezuelan migrants and asylum-seekers who have entered the country in the last few years. This has rendered its response to the current crisis ad hoc and reactive. On the other hand, Colombia features some of the characteristics typically associated with effective utilization of constitutionalized human rights law on behalf of refugees and asylum-seekers: a rights-based Constitution, a strong Constitutional Court, and a small but determined subset of civil society devoted to the protection of non-citizens. This chapter explores how refugee lawyers operating within this context have attempted to utilize the Constitution—and other legal avenues—to extend human rights protection to the recent influx of Venezuelans crossing the border into Colombia. In this way, Colombia serves as something of an emerging test case to demonstrate how constitutionalized human rights law might be most effectively utilized at the earliest stages of a nation’s experience with a large-scale influx of refugees. For Colombia to emerge as a model, however, its refugee lawyers will need to consider the process strategically through which the constitutionalized human rights of refugees and asylum-seekers receive protection.