Profesión jurídica : abogados y acceso a la tierra en Colombia

Abstract

This article seeks to compare human rights lawyers who are members of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) and property law (civil law) lawyers in Colombia, who have specialized on the enforceability land property. The objective of this comparison is to identify the role that these legal advisers and NGOs have played in the processes to access and formalize land tenure. The article assumes that evidencing the practices and legal services provided by organized civil-society stakeholders, as well as lawyers who respond to interests, reveal the influence of these actors in the changes of power dynamics on land tenure. Depending on the legal frameworks and approaches given to the enforceability processes on the right to land, either by property law or Human Rights, the outcomes are contradictory. On the one hand, the processes of access to the individual land conducted under property law generates fewer distributive results; on the other hand, accessing to land tenure through public policy or Human Rights standards lead to the contrary outcome, meaning more distributive effects. In this sense, the hypothesis suggested is that the practices promoted by property law lawyers tend to reinforce the unequal structures of land tenure; whereas, the procedures anchored to Human Rights Law tend to counteract the inequity in such tenure. The proposed analysis enables the understanding of the practice of diverse legal perspectives and tools in the protection of the access to land and its effects in Colombia. For organized civil society actors, the use of the discourse of International Human Rights law is prevalent, while for lawyers with particular and individual interests, resorting to property law is the dominant practice.