Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Development
Enforceability of ESCR
Equality and Non-discrimination
Poverty
Right to Water and Sanitation
Right to Work
Mayor of Cali imposed a new and unilateral avenue of reform, disregarding the
committees recommendations. While the mayors plan envisioned and effectively
created and imposed a Waste Public Recycling Company (Girasol EICE) in which
it supposedly wanted to include traditional, informal recyclers in some
undetermined manner, the company went bankrupt shortly after its creation.
For the Cali case the Constitutional Court has remained unresponsive to the
petitioners requests for monitoring as well as to reports and requests submitted by
CIVISOL as defender and implementation overseer. While more than USD 6
million has been spent through nonprofit public contracting to purportedly
implement the Courts decision, the results of such spending have been minimal,
and limited to a small number of workshops on gardening and accounting. Thus,
recyclers are still extremely disadvantaged and lacking in basic societal guarantees.
Their work continues to be precarious, informal and crucial for supplying a flow of
cheap secondary commodities (plastic, metal, paper, glass, and cardboard) to the
intermediary warehouses of Colombia and also for exporting abroad.
Significance of the Case:
This case is an example of bottom-up change driven by public litigation. It is also
a landmark case regarding the use of law to reduce structural poverty. (In its
amicus, CIVISOL managed to structure arguments in a way that empowered
informal waste pickers in Cali and highlighted the constitutional rights involved).
The case also develops the Courts jurisprudence on the positive steps the State
must take to compensate for material inequality between groups, rather than
limiting itself to a definition of equality before the law premised on state
abstention. Thus, the decision discusses the role and types of positive
discrimination that State agencies must adopt to protect vulnerable and
marginalized groups. Among such positive steps the Court advocates a human
rights rather than purely economic approach to public contracts.