Teleological expansion of the procedural mechanism of group action from a configuration of Colombian legal realism

Abstract

The group action is a procedural mechanism of procedural roots established by the National Constituent Assembly in article 88 of the Constitution, as an action that originates from the damages caused to a plural number of people, without prejudice to the corresponding individual actions. However, the foregoing, the constituent himself states in the first paragraph of the aforementioned article 88 that he will be the legislator in charge of regulating the procedural aspects of the constitutional device in question. The legislature complied with the order imposed by the constitutional text and, through Law 472 of August 5, 1988, development in article 88 of the Constitution in relation to the exercise of group actions. With regard to the origin and the purpose pursued by enervating this procedural action, the legislator provided in articles 3 and 46 that the purpose pursued by the persons requesting the action is for the recognition and payment of the compensation for damages caused. The foregoing denotes that for the legislator the group action was provided for exclusively to obtain an exclusively economic reparation for people who have suffered common harm. However, within the Colombian legal system immersed under a theory of legal realism canon law, a new finalistic conception is exported with a broader radius of action, since it is observed in the judicial praxis of the administrative judges of the republic, the possibility of requesting, apart from pecuniary appraisals, reparations of a moral and psychological nature that help to further dignify the situation of the plaintiffs.