Legal Affairs News Channel
The criteria for a person to be recognized as a refugee in Colombia, in accordance with the provisions of the internal legal system and in different international treaties, are: armed conflicts, persecutions for political, ideological, religious, ethnic reasons, of nationality or belonging to a certain social group, serious health conditions and/or contexts of systematic human rights violations.
However, today there are many myths and questions around this international protection application figure in Colombia, which revolve around their procedure: what is it? How should it be presented? Who does it appear before? Is there a certain time to decide? What decisions can be given in this process?
Well, first of all, the request for recognition of the refugee status is an international protection mechanism for those who are within some of the grounds mentioned above, from the 1957 Convention on the Statute of the Refugees, its 1967 protocol and the declaration of Cartagena of 1984.
Additionally, the State of Colombia has implemented within its internal legal system this figure, through Decree 1067 of 2015, which has been regulated by Law 2136 of 2021, better known as the comprehensive migratory policy – PIM, and of the “recently out of the oven” Decree 089 of 2025.
Secondly, this request is presented to the authority in charge of the State of Colombia to review it: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Foreign Ministry, through its Advisory Commission for the determination of the refugee status (CONARE).
Following the above, if the literal tenor of the regulations in force in Colombia and international treaties are reviewed, in principle there is no format or type of document through which this type of requests must be submitted. However, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the country created a model that must be followed to the letter so that a application is studied.
This study will include two major stages: one of admissibility of the application, where “formal” criteria are reviewed of what the person has presented to the entity, and one in the background, where the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will enter to analyze in its criteria if the applicant meets the criteria to be recognized as a refugee.
Once the application is admitted for study, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asks the special administrative unit Migration Colombia to issue a permanence safe-conduct (SC-2) that will be valid for 180 days from the day of its expedition, extendable until it is resolved.
During the fundamental stage, the requesting person -along with their beneficiaries -can be summoned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to present interviews, to provide new evidence or, even, to send more details about their application.
Now, the decision made by the entity may be favorable or unfavorable to the interesting interests. That is, the person can be recognized as a refugee or not. This will be done through an administrative act, called resolution, and can be controversial through a replacement resource, which must be presented in the ten business days following its notification.
The controversial factor in this procedure is that, to date, a maximum time has not been established in which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs must make a decision on the request for recognition of the refugee status, so it can take several weeks, months or, even, years.
Finally, the favorable decision to recognize a person as a refugee in Colombia implies that the person is awarded a travel document, which is similar to a passport, a V -type visa of refugee and, consequently, a foreigner card. This allows their human rights to be materialized in the country, of course, without taking into account political rights, which are reserved for Colombian citizens, except for small exceptions.
