Spanish
Bogotá,.- Former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010) filed a criminal complaint with the Investigation and Accusation Commission of the House of Representatives against President Gustavo Petro for "harassment and slander".
This was reported this Friday by the law firm Víctor Mosquera Marín, which acts on behalf of Uribe, who will receive a sentence today after having been convicted in the first instance last Monday for the crimes of procedural fraud and bribery in criminal proceedings.
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"The facts that motivate this criminal action stem from a series of public statements made by the head of state on July 28 and 29, 2025, through his official account on the social network X, with an audience of more than 8 million followers," stated the law firm. According to the lawyers, "President Petro made direct, unfounded accusations lacking judicial support, attributing to former President Uribe seriously criminal behaviors such as homicides, drug trafficking, paramilitarism, and corruption, facts for which there is no criminal conviction or judicial decision." Uribe, 73 years old and head of the right-wing Democratic Center party, became on Monday the first Colombian former president criminally convicted in a process that pits him against left-wing senator Iván Cepeda. In one of the multiple messages published by Petro about the trial after the sentence was known, he assured that Uribe "did not combat paramilitary terrorism, but rather, he pact with it several times". For the signature Víctor Mosquera Marín, "these expressions, uttered from the presidential investiture and using institutional channels, not only constitute an attack on the honor, good name and personal and political dignity" of Uribe, "but also constitute a systematic conduct of stigmatization and political harassment". "Said conduct represents a clear violation of constitutional and international limits on freedom of expression, in accordance with the reiterated jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, the American Convention on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the principles of prohibition of hate speech and non-political discrimination that govern the international human rights system," the information added.
