The Council of State summoned the national registrar, Alexander Vega, to a public hearing on Wednesday, April 6, to discuss the demands against his election to office for the period 2019-2023 for alleged irregularities.
The lawsuits, which had been on file with the high court since 16 January 2020, were filed by the Front for Social Anti-Corruption Response, which questioned the selection process carried out by the presidents of the high courts in 2019 to give Vega the position of national registrar.
In addition, the legal actions brought by the lawyer Carolina Munévar, the director of the Anti-Corruption Institute, Camilo Enciso and the Attorney General's Office, question the fact that the selection procedure was not carried out in a reserved manner, as required by law, and that the latter did not have citizen oversight either.
The newspaper El Colombiano also noted that, in the lawsuits, the change in the minimum score needed by candidates to advance the selection process for the position of national registrar is also questioned. According to what was compiled by the same medium, initially the applicant's career path had a score of 700, but then it was modified to 200.
According to the newspaper Antioquia, with that change in score, Vega, who did not have a long career, ended up at the top of the list of the 54 candidates selected to be elected as the next national registrar.
Another argument in the lawsuits is that, on the day of the interviews, to be held at the Palace of Justice, the venue of the meeting was changed three hours before them, according to the presidents of the high courts, due to the student protests of October 19, 2019.
At the hearing, according to Semana magazine, by order of the office of the judge of the Fifth Section of the Council of State, Luis Alberto Álvarez Parra, who is in charge of the trial, the Second Delegate Attorney to the Council of State, a representative of the State Legal Defense Agency, and the judges were summoned Alvaro Fernando García Restrepo and José Francisco Acuña Viscaya (Supreme Court of Justice), Álvaro Namen Vargas (Council of State) and Gloria Stella Ortiz Delgado (Constitutional Court).
Similarly, the high court cited other identified plaintiffs such as José Roberto Acosta Ramos and León Valencia Agudelo.
After the hearing, the Fifth Section of the Council of State will be responsible for determining whether or not there are merits to support the claims of the claims, that is, whether or not the election of Alexander Vega as national registrar is annulled.
Regarding the meeting, which is scheduled a little over a month before the presidential elections on May 13, and days after the legislative votes, whose inconsistencies led many sectors to ask the registrar to resign from the head of the National Registry Office, Vega assured in dialogue with the newspaper El Espectador that “there is no reason to leave office.”
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