Being an irregular Venezuelan migrant and requesting the protection of the right to health in Colombia: Human Rights and restrictive legal frameworks

Abstract

Venezuelan immigration to Colombia today is the largest in history and the right to health is a human right recognized by the constitutional order of all regardless of nationality. For this reason we will analyze four sentences of the Colombian Constitutional Court in which the right to health was granted to Venezuelans in an irregular migratory condition. The idea is to be able to approach the foundations that the Court used for the application of the concept of universality of human rights or other legal and national normative criteria. In this sense, the first section will describe the case study and contextualize the problem. In a second section, the theoretical perspectives that are expected to be read from the proposed case will be analyzed. We will explain how human rights, as a category of world order from the definition of universality, enters into tension with the national criteria of the State in matters of irregular migration, and how this tension is the product of senses that are created from the management of international migration or from the governance of migration. In a third moment, the findings of the case will be presented and analyzed from the theoretical approach proposed, in order to arrive at some final reflections that approach a theoretical and practical reading of what is identified in the content of these analyzed sentences.