Popular Consultation as a Way of Environmental Protection and Environmental Rights: Case study of Cajamarca

Abstract

The consultative poll in Colombia, has emerged as a mechanism for participation, elevated to the rank that it has allowed communities may be able to make decisions on aspects relevant to their lives, against the exploitation of the subsoil, the State is the competent constitutional and owner to decide on all the national territory, has led him in some cases ignored the opinion of communities that they sit on the sites, it has generated that the referendum is a mechanism so that these communities are pronounced and decide on allowing or not, materials mining projects premiums or precious minerals that could affect their fundamental right to a healthy environment.

Besides, you have generated all kinds of pronouncements in favor or against decisions taken by the community, however, within the Colombian legal system, tensions had not been generated in this aspect since the State, from its central component, is who makes decisions without consulting the communities. , although the project of extraction will be directly affected, so recently, the consultative poll has taken strength in the mechanism of access to environmental justice in the broad sense, since the exercise has allowed providing legal tools to the community response, the requirements that the central Government done, concerning the use of the subsoil in communities, making visible their right to participate in decisions affecting the environment and creating a counterweight to the power which This area has the status.