Following a request by a leading Colombian newspaper, the country’s Inspector General for the second time decided to assume the role of mediator to try to mend relations between President Alvaro Uribe and the Supreme Court.
Inspector General Alejandro Ordoñez had earlier tried to mediate between presidency and court, but his efforts were dismissed by the country’s highest judicial body, which claimed that if Uribe stayed within the boundaries of the law, there would be no clashes.
After continued clashes and the court’s refusal to elect a new Prosecutor General from the President’s shortlist, newspaper El Tiempo’s director Roberto Pompo asked Ordoñez in an op-ed to again attempt mediation. Colombia’s new Prosecutor General should have been elected before the end of July, but the Court considers Uribe’s candidates unqualified. None of the three nominees have experience in penal law.
The prosecutor told El Tiempo that if both parties accept his role as mediator he would take up the task as a matter of “national urgency and an institutional obligation that I can not ignore.”
Ordoñez on Tuesday contacted the Presidency and magistrates of the Supreme Court in an attempt to start mediation.
Supreme Court President Augusto Ibañez, speaking to RCN Radio, reiterated the court’s position that the judicial body is doing its work according to the constitution, without referring to Ordoñez’s self-imposed mediatorship.
The Inspector General himself is being investigated by the Supreme Court for allegedly deciding illegally not to prosecute government officials accused of bribing Congressmen to secure Uribe’s 2006 re-election.