What has been Congress's role in the face of the health and economic emergency the country is facing?
The year 2020 has undoubtedly been one of the most critical for the world. The unexpected arrival of a pandemic, whose treatment remains complex, has led governments to improvise in order to maintain social, economic, health, and political balance. March passed with the declaration of a State of Health Emergency in Colombia following the announcement of a pandemic by the World Health Organization due to the spread of Covid-19. At the beginning of the same month, the first positive case was registered in the country. The mission at the time was to contain its expansion at all costs.
Economic activities in the national territory came to a standstill almost immediately. From March 24th to the end of April, most active sectors remained behind closed doors or survived virtually. The situation of the legislature was no exception.
Until June 20th, the sessions of the Senate and the House of Representatives took place. Without a doubt, the second ordinary session, which began on March 16th, was the most atypical in the recent history of Congress. The discussion on the possibility of virtual sessions and its implementation, the large volume of political oversight debates, and the archiving of a high number of bills (whose discussion never took place) were the three events that marked the second half of the legislative session.
And this is because, despite the national government having issued more than 150 decrees with the force of law, under the figure of the State of Economic Emergency, Congress has played a languid role in the political oversight that corresponds to it according to the Constitution, and which is complemented by legal oversight, which is the responsibility of the Constitutional Court.
In essence, the current situation resembles that of the last century, when the Government became the de facto legislator and Congress was relegated to the background. Today, the political control debates that took place in the committees and plenaries of both chambers seemed more like an accountability session for the ministers and other officials summoned, with little or no agency from the senators and representatives who were limited by the virtual platforms on which they convened.
According to the 1991 Constitution, within the conditions for declaring a State of Economic Emergency, as stated in Article 215, Congress must convene to examine the causes that motivated the declaration and evaluate the relevance of the legislative decrees issued (with the power to even modify their content). However, neither chamber fulfilled its task: the hours they dedicated to evaluating the situation were relatively few, and they did not issue any definitive opinion on the decrees, which include sensitive issues such as labor regulation and public order, for example.
Thus, Congress has time to process the political oversight that, among other things, can be carried out outside of the legislative session (as indicated by Article 138 of the Constitution, where it is defined as its own function). In this way, the balance of powers, which has been diminished following the declaration of the State of Emergency, would be reestablished.
For legal researcher David Israel González Pogo, enshrining the principle of the separation of powers and “checks and balances” as a constitutional form of state public power organization prevents the centralization of power and curbs autocracy. In his research, he cites associate professor at the National University of Colombia, Jheison Torres Ávila, on “the need to prevent public power from concentrating in such a way that it can subject and subordinate the people to its dictates.” The separation of powers is essential for the healthy development of states' political dynamics.
“All men who have power are inclined to abuse it; they will go on until they find limits. To prevent power from being abused, it is necessary that, by the disposition of things, power stop power,” Montesquieu rightly stated in his theory on the separation of powers of the State. His principles maintain that the legal distribution of executive, legislative, and judicial functions can only limit the arbitrary use of power to safeguard the freedom and rights of citizens.
