Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos said Tuesday he was “not backing the Inspector General” against the court by saying that he had the right to stand for re-election.
Santos said that his comments Tuesday morning, when he said that the Inspector General Alejandro Ordoñez Maldonado’s “good work” in the office precluded him from making a comment on the controversy surrounding the inspector’s anti-abortion claims, didn’t mean he supported the Inspector.
“The Inspector is the person responsible for the discipline of officials, and it would be bad of me to promote a person who was encouraging indiscipline,” said the president.
According to the president, some people had come to the “wrong conclusion that I was backing him in his dispute with the Constitutional Court,” said Santos referring to last week’s ruling that Ordoñez should rectify claims that sexual education campaigns were “mass campaigns to promote abortion as a right,” and that the morning-after pill constitutes as abortion.
“The Inspector General has been a good Inspector General. One may or may not agree with his religious and ideological thoughts, but nobody can deny he has done a good job,” said the president.
“We are in a state of law,” said Santos, “the Inspector General must comply with what the Constitutional Court ordered.”