Supreme Court upholds bullfighting as legal
By Daniel Brody, Editorial Director
Monday, August 30, 2010
A lawsuit attempting to stop bullfighting and other sports involving animals in Colombia was rejected on Monday by the Constitutional Court.
The plaintiffs, a group of environmental and animal rights activists, filed the lawsuit to protect the animals included in sports such as bullfighting, cockfighting, and rodeos under a 1989 animal rights statute, and questioned the constitutionality of the exception granted to the individual sports mentioned in the law. They also cited Article 12 of the Constitution, which states that human beings and animals cannot be treated in a degrading way.
The court threw out the lawsuit by a margin of 6-3, citing the sports as expressions of "deeply-rooted customs" of Colombian culture deserving of exemption from the law, even as the court recognized a certain cruelty displayed towards the animals involved in the sports.
However, as a compromise, the court established some conditions to protect the bulls and roosters used in the aforementioned sports.
The lawsuit is the second in a year that sought to bring sports involving animals under the jurisdiction of Colombia's animal rights law. In October of last year, a similar case was dismissed for legal technicalities unrelated to the substance of the lawsuit.
Spokesmen for the plaintiffs vowed that the fight was not over, and planned to collect seven million signatures to put a referendum on the ballot to be voted on by the Colombian people.
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Colombian Culture
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