Author: Maria Angélica Molina Martínez
Citizens were dissatisfied on Car-Free and Motorcycle-Free Day due to the amount of toxic particles emitted by public transport vehicles.
Students from CUE Alexander von Humboldt discovered that “the Corporation has been failing to comply with the rule for 10 years, and its excuse has always been to tell people that they do not have the equipment available to carry out the work.”
The Council of State, one of the country’s highest courts, issued a ruling in the second instance in favor of a popular action presented by Sebastián Peláez Uribe, a student in the Law program at the von Humboldt University, which obliges six public entities of the department of Quindío to implement measures to protect a healthy environment for the benefit of all Quindíos.
The ruling confirms that the Quindío Regional Corporation, the Quindío Departmental Transit Institute, and the municipal transit institutes of Armenia, Calarcá, La Tebaida and Quimbaya must carry out specific actions to safeguard the collective right to enjoy a healthy environment, as as established by the Constitution.
Sebastián Peláez Uribe commented on the origin of this legal action: “All this derives from a practice carried out at the University, where we followed up on a news story about environmental contamination in the department. With this, we find that pollution control operations are not carried out for vehicles. Now, these entities must fix the measurement equipment to subsequently constantly carry out these control operations, benefiting the environment and the health of all Quindians.”
This ruling represents a significant step in the protection of the environment in Quindío and underlines the positive impact that academic initiatives can have on society.
“We are the department with the highest rate of deaths from respiratory diseases, so taking this into account, we began to send petition rights to all entities because there are supposed to be air meters here that indicate the quality of the air. air in the cities, and we discovered that here those meters are damaged,” explained Peláez Uribe.
“In addition to this, there are regulations from 2008 that require operations on emissions from mobile sources, which are those that regulate chimney vehicles and are in charge of the CRQ.”
The student and his classmates discovered that “the Autonomous Corporation has been failing to comply with the rule for 10 years, and its explanation has always been to tell people that they do not have the equipment available to carry out the work.”
Due to the above, around 2019 the young man and his companions filed the first Popular Action before the Administrative Court of Quindío TAQ to denounce the problems they found in the CRQ.
Read: 157 summonses were issued for violating car-free day
Order Tracking
A new hearing is scheduled for May 30 to verify whether the CRQ is executing the court’s ruling. “We hope that now in the budget for the second half of the year the Corporation will buy or rent the equipment and make the respective contracts to be able to begin carrying out mobile source operations with which they verify the particles emitted by vehicles to immobilize the that do not comply with the regulations.
This news was known within the framework of the Day without cars and without motorcycles, in which different citizens were dissatisfied with the emission of gases by public transport vehicles, one of the few that could circulate on the streets of the city, since even one of them apparently had an affectation that made it eliminate large amounts of smoke in its path.
The exercise of carrying out a Popular Action
The von Humboldt faculties have the exercise of carrying out nuclear projects in each of the semesters, the dean of the Faculty of Law stated that in the case of this program in the third semester the students must carry out a Popular Action.
“At the end of the semester, those projects that have the greatest impact are identified and in the fourth semester the student gets involved in a strategy that the program has, called Strategic Litigation to carry out the materialization of that good work, so in this semester the student “He is dedicated to the construction of the Popular Action that he himself is going to present.”
One of the purposes of carrying out the exercise is to generate a social impact, since Popular Actions address collective rights, and as the rulings are favorable to the community, a positive impact is produced for the community.
