Legal evolution of State responsibility for terrorist acts in Colombia

Abstract

The evolution of the Judicial Precedent of the Council of State, regarding the issue of the non-contractual liability of the Colombian State for terrorist acts, has been setting some guidelines which must be taken into account in order to determine or impute liability to the State, in the events in which a State entity omits the warning or prevention of a threat of a terrorist act, or when it puts at risk the population where a military base is established that is declared objective of the illegal terrorist groups, generating to itself a failure of the service in the protection of the population or placing it at risk which it is not obliged to bear. The objective of the present work is to determine, based on the jurisprudence of the State Council, when the Colombian State has the legal duty to compensate people when they have suffered damage due to a terrorist attack, starting from the antecedents to international level about the object of study and conducting a study of the main decisions of the State Council on state responsibility for this type of acts, for the development of the same will be used the deductive method because of the initiation of investigation of the concepts general of the State’s non-contractual liability and the different titles of attribution of state responsibility, applying them in a special way against terrorist acts. As a conclusion, it is established that in Colombia, despite the fact that there is a normative field through which victims of terrorism can claim some compensation or compensation, it is the administrative contentious jurisdiction that the victims prefer to go and thus obtain a comprehensive reparation to their damages caused by a terrorist act that the State had to avoid