núm. 12 (2012): revista via iuris 12 (enero - junio)

This paper aims to identify some of the existing conceptual elements that would allow to speak of the Union of South American Nations -UNASUR- like scenario of South American integration. To do this, first, it will be conducted a conceptual approach on globalization as a phenomenon that underpins the current integration processes. Second, it will be identified some of the most representative features of the state as a relevant actor in the international system, by making active part of existing integration processes. Third, some elements will be identified around the relationship between the Nation State and Globalization. Finally, it will be developed some considerations concerning to UNASUR as a new scenario of integration in South America.

Considering the politics of liberation as a solution from Latin American alterity to the problems caused by the bad public administrations of nation states like Colombia, it is essential to know how a proposal focusing on ethics works to develop a new type of government, more democratic, more participative, and primarily more inclusive. It is possible to break the vicious circle created by colonial administrations to exploit the Latin American people and consider a new stage of development from the proper management of resources for prosperity. It is the development of an own ethical-political project, which ignores foreign solutions, which have proven to be disastrous for social progress of these countries, being a model for accumulation of wealth of a few, who are articulated to the global economic system, meeting international rather than national interests. Thus, the article develops a theory of liberation into a nation state with its own political model, as expressed in the works of Enrique Dussel, and focuses on a philosophy that includes the opressed, the victim, everyone who for one reason or another have been excluded from the system, violating some of their fundamental rights such as life, dignity, freedom and equality. In conclusion, this study examines the prospects of a new political model, alternative to the political models imposed by the global system.

The article presents the results of the research project, part of the research group “Sphere of the public and citizen participation”, in the research line “Training in Ethics and Politics”. There are presented the definitions of the basic categories of analysis, the methodological process of gathering information through analysis matrices and, finally, the results obtained. The focus of this article is to present the analysis and discussion of the results achieved, and therefore the approach to social representations that the students of the Fundación Universitaria Los Libertadores have developed about the public. The study was based on the selection and order made by students of provided images, which are related to certain elements of the public determined with the above categories, around hypothetical matrix raised for research: on which are the places where the public relations can be located preferentially; if this is the constituent (is built?) or is made (is learned?); and on the relational aspect of the public: is interaction, roles or codes? In two areas: languages (verbal, iconic, body) and values. It is found that the social representation that students have built about public consists of leaders clearly identifiable by their social roles and functions related to political activism as spatially located in places of gratuity and freedom, whose purpose is the common good, in which the expected sense is of safety and protection. Despite this positive view of the public, the attitude on occupy a political and active role is reluctant and negative, which is analyzed as detrimental to the role and status of the student as a political and critical actor in the development and construction of community and society.

An issue such as the incidence of political concepts of the Spanish neo-scholastic in emancipating thought of independence precursors in Nueva Granada, even when arises only in terms of a philosophical and/or historical analysis of the procedence and articulation of those concepts in texts, requires a framework for further study if you do not want to fall into the anachronism of judging from a contemporary reading concepts that in their time and place had particular interpretation and uses. A study framework that runs beyond the mere comparison of definitions or incidences, sometimes made explicit in the texts by the precursors, and allows to visualize these readings, uses, interests and habits that influenced in the articulation of the concepts of Neo-scholasticism with Enlightenment ideas, and adaptation of the latter to colonial traditions that prevailed beyond independence, and prompted reflection and political practices that erected the nineteenth century republic of New Granada. In order to view these aspects, the thematic review has been divided into three key excerpts: 1. A change of regimen and times: from Hapsburgs to the Bourbons; 2. Education: sources, traditions, reforms and permanences; 3. Emancipation as part of a tradition (Discussion).

This article aims to reflect upon the prospects Brazil and Colombia would have to become the leaders of a new cooperative security model to be established in Latin America. The end of the Cold War has opened to the subcontinent new perspectives related to unthinkable possibilities of cooperation and integration. Nonetheless, the challenges brought up by new and serious security regional problems needed to be solved. A context marked by the US getting deeply involved in Middle East affairs are the ideal ground for integration and cooperative proposals by which Brazil try to convince its neighbors, and specially Colombia, to build up a new security structure in Latin America. The author shall have as a starting point the theoretical basis of “co-operative hegemony” proposed by Pedersen, a paradigm for analyzing the process by which states having the goal for obtaining a regional leadership using integration dynamics, achieve the main aim of more relative power (“advantages of scale”) in the economics, commercial and common security fields, just to mention some of the most significant. This academic work focuses on the question how Brazil,-after decades of lack of interest or even mistrust towards Colombia-,aims to have a close relationship with the Andean country. Especially the defense and security aspects are seen as priorities, in a prevention perspective, in order to project Brazil’s regional power. On the other hand, the author shall analyze how this aim could be of advantage for the Andean country by achieving its goals regarding a so long dreamed stability in the regional context.

Increasingly the Constitutional Court and judicial precedent management take greater importance in the Colombian legal system and its analysis. Beyond the literality of the law, jurisprudence stands as the meeting place for lawyers, law professors and researchers. Within this increasingly significant area lies this article. In first place, it aims to highlight the relevance of Constitutional Court and the precedent; the above to structure a framework to analyze the rulings of the Constitutional Court regarding the right to education for LGBTI population, an issue that has been very scarcely considered by legal specialized literature. The analysis of this relationship will show that the Court does not seem a guarantor of the right to education for LGBTI population, despite it is recognized as fundamental in some of their rulings. However, the language managed by the Court itself does not allow a rethinking of linguistic categories used to nominate gender roles outside the patriarchal binary scheme. In the interpretation of norms that regulate the system of education, cultural source of social exclusion towards the no-manly gender identities, persists a linguistic obstacle facing realities such as the existence of multiple ways to build sexual diversity. In terms of justification, ratification by the Colombian state of CEDAW (1979), and the enactment of rulings such as C-029/09 by the Constitutional Court, demands diagnostics on how language itself that creates law, which reveals emancipatory and guarantor, may nonetheless settle exclusion, so it ends up being more violent than any other cultural structure. This text serves as a kind of diagnosis of LGBTI people and the right to education in the judgments of the Colombian Constitutional Court from 1991 to present.

Are few, dispersed and broad the concrete precedents that speak of an explicit public policy in urban planning in Colombia, what propels to determine national precedents that allows its elaboration. This article presents those of constitutional nature which provide a preliminary conceptualization of public policy and urban planning as default categories of research. The text suggests that urban planning policies are means of consolidation of the general walfare that must come from a constitutional mandate to optimize the social and ecological function of property.

Taking as reference the constitutional jurisprudence on legal stability contracts in Colombia, this paper presents how transnational forms of production of rules are embodied by the symbolic power of law as internal rules. Despite fulfilling the formal requirements of generality, impersonality and abstraction, those rules end up giving validity to partial parallel forms of regulation or law that can be understood under the concept of internal legal pluralism.

Whenever someone has a fundamental right, there is a valid rule of law giving it to him. A major reason for the above is that it seems to be a lack of a correct and precise questioning to the prerogatives inherent to the human being, generating, in this way, several questions according to Alexis (2003), among which we find the normative, empirical, conceptual or analytical type. Then, under the conception of a structural theory of fundamental rights to determine its nature, import mainly conceptual or analytical issues in the usual distinction made by Bobbio (2003) between validity, effectiveness and legitimacy. In this sense, the focus of this analysis is constructed form a concept of individual rights evolved, allowing to understand the current situation of the right to health, understood as a fundamental social right that is feasibly materialize through the courts, covered in the paradigm of material constitution, which is the main conclusion.