Institute for Migrant Rights
Railway line at Cianjur station, c. 1890 · KITLV, CC BY 4.0

Migration Jurisprudence from the South › Colombia

Sentencia SU-677/17 (emergency health care for migrants without status)

Constitutional Court of Colombia · Colombia · 2017-11-15 · National court

Citation: SU-677/17
Type of case: Constitutional and human rights
Outcome: Decided for the migrant side

Question

Must Colombia provide health care to Venezuelan migrants who have no regular status?

What the court decided

Yes, at least emergency care, read broadly in light of the right to a dignified life; full enrolment in the health system generally requires regularising status.

In plain language

A pregnant woman from Venezuela without legal status in Colombia was refused prenatal care. The Constitutional Court said everyone, with or without papers, has a right to urgent health care, understood broadly.

Dalam bahasa sederhana

Seorang perempuan hamil dari Venezuela tanpa status hukum di Kolombia ditolak layanan kehamilan. MK menyatakan setiap orang, berdokumen atau tidak, berhak atas layanan kesehatan darurat yang dipahami secara luas.

Pertanyaan: Apakah Kolombia wajib memberi layanan kesehatan kepada migran Venezuela yang tidak punya status tetap?

What happened afterwards

  • 2017-11-15: Unification ruling issued.
  • 2018–2022: Followed in later rulings such as T-074/19 and T-296/22.

Sources

Open this decision in the interactive collection (compare, filter, Indonesian view, downloads).

Cite as: Institute for Migrant Rights (2026), Migration Jurisprudence from the South, version 0.1, https://theimr.org/court-decisions/d/co-su-677-2017/. This page summarizes a court decision for research and advocacy; it is not legal advice.

For researchers

This collection of decisions is built for empirical legal scholarship and socio-legal research on migration and the rights of migrant workers, as well as for advocacy.

The coded variables support statistical analysis in law: cross-national comparison, regression and event-history designs, and law and economics questions such as how recruitment fees, wage protection and limits on changing employer affect migrant workers. The data can be downloaded for replication.

Keywords: case law; jurisprudence; judicial decisions; comparative constitutional law; courts and migration; judicial behavior; litigation outcomes; refugee law; non-refoulement; citizenship and nationality; empirical legal studies; empirical legal scholarship; quantitative legal research; statistical analysis in law; law and economics; law and economics of migration; comparative law; socio-legal studies; legal pluralism; migration law; labor migration; migrant workers’ rights; human rights law; access to justice; Global South; Asia; Africa; Middle East; Latin America; Indonesia; open data; replication data.