Tutela on labor rights. Amicus strategically presented to claim for protection of rights to livelihood, to work, to a life with dignity, and to development among others. Informal Waste Pickers in Cali. Eviction. Sedentary waste pickers prohibited by Decree 838/05 from working in new sanitary landfills and urban waste pickers prohibited by Law 1259/08 from recuperating recyclables from trash bags on curbs and transporting them in non-motorized vehicles.
In Bogota, the Court has continued to monitor the implementation of this decision through Auto 268-10 and Auto 275-11, although the actual impact of the decision has been minimal. Cali has not received equal attention. Following ruling T-291-09 a 12 member committee was formed to reform the waste collection policy. This committee included six representatives from the state, four from recycler organizations, one from the ombudsman office and one from the CIVISOL foundation for systemic change. This committee proposed that the traditional, informal recyclers would create an organization to undertake waste collection and management and operate the recycling public service with exclusivity. However, according to CIVISOL, one month before presenting this policy to the Court, the Mayor of Cali imposed a new and unilateral avenue of reform, disregarding the committee’s recommendations. While the mayor’s 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 Court’s 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.
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 Court’s 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.
Updated on July 2013
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