The Colombian Justice postponed the hearing to define the freedom of former president Álvaro Uribe

The Colombian Justice has postponed this Wednesday until September 22 the hearing to define the freedom of the former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), in house arrest for a little over a month, while being investigated for an alleged crime of electoral fraud and for links with paramilitary groups.

A judge of a Bogotá court will assess during these additional days if there is jurisprudence to declare itself competent or not to resolve Uribe’s current situation, after the defense of one of the affected parties, Senator Iván Cepeda, defended that the magistrate did not have the legal powers to release Uribe.

According to Cepeda’s defense, the investigation must continue under the framework of Law 600 that governs the gauges, since in the process, which comes from the Supreme Court since Uribe resigned from his position as senator, there was no change of legislation, but the investigating body.

The defense has emphasized that “simply” the file has passed from the Supreme Court of Instruction to the Prosecutor’s Office, “but the procedure is maintained because it was in force at the time of the commission of the alleged facts under investigation”.

Uribe has more than fifty processes opened against him for various crimes, some of them related to alleged links with paramilitary squads.

This case is an investigation into alleged crimes of electoral fraud and witness manipulation, which arose after the former president himself initiated a process against Senator Iván Cepeda, whom he denounced for directing an alleged manipulation of witnesses to accuse him of links with paramilitaries.

However, the Supreme Court closed the investigation against Cepeda and the person under investigation became Uribe himself, since the testimonies of former paramilitaries that the Senator of the Democratic Pole collected in some prisons accusing the former president were not the product of manipulation or payments.

“Uribe must not be released, as he represents a danger to the proper administration of justice”Cepeda wrote on his Twitter account.

Uribe’s defense, like the Attorney General’s Office, has opposed the requests of the victims and has defended that the process must be subject to Law 906, a rule that governs ordinary justice, since the accused no longer has constitutional jurisdiction.

The victims of the numerous processes that Uribe has to face are suspicious of the Prosecutor’s Office, being in the hands of a close friend of the president, Iván Duque, who is in turn one of Uribe’s protégés, according to broad sectors of the country.

This is also considered by the relatives of the human rights defense lawyer Jesús María Valle, for whose murder at the end of the 90s Uribe is also investigated for his alleged collusion with the paramilitary squads that killed him while the former president was the governor of Antioquia.

With information from Europa Press

MORE ON THIS TOPIC:

Álvaro Uribe resigned from his seat in the Colombian Senate

The Colombian Prosecutor’s Office refused to release former President Álvaro Uribe