Displaced people demonstrated outside the Colombian Interior and Justice Ministry on Friday, demanding that the presidency’s Accion Social program safeguard rights the refugees were guaranteed by the Constitutional Court.
The approximately 200 protesters say that they have no way of surviving without the payment of housing subsidies promised in the court’s T-025 decree, which in 2004 formally declared that the internal refugees’ living conditions needed to be addressed by the appropriate authorities.
The decree noted that “due to action or omission by the authorities in providing displaced population with optimum and effective protection, thousands of people suffer multiple and continuous violations of their human rights.”
In May, a group of around 90 displaced Colombians took over an abandoned property in Bogota in protest over the government’s inaction towards their lack of housing.
The protesters asked local and national authorities to help them return to the properties that they have been displaced from, mostly in the departments of Cauca, Huila, and the Caribbean coast.
