Center for Reproductive Rights Opens New Regional Office in Colombia
(PRESS RELEASE) Today, the Center for Reproductive Rights announced
the opening of its new regional office for Latin America and the Caribbean in
Bogotá, Colombia. The Center has worked in the region for fifteen years, advancing
women’s access to reproductive health services, through human rights litigation
and the documentation of reproductive rights violations.
“We’ve seen tremendous advancements in women’s reproductive rights in
Latin America in the last decade, including the groundbreaking 2006 constitutional
court decision in Colombia decriminalizing the country’s blanket abortion ban,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights.
“Now is a critical time to strengthen our presence in the region to make sure that
those legal victories translate into real gains for women and that efforts to
undermine that progress are defeated.”
During the first year, the new regional office will focus on the most “With our new regional office, we |
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As a global
organization, the Center brings unique expertise in international human rights
law and knowledge of comparative legal strategies to defend and promote women’s
reproductive rights. The
Center’s work in Latin America includes the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights case Paulina
Ramirez v. Mexico which is widely recognized as a driving force behind
a renewed debate on abortion that culminated in the decriminalization of Mexico
City’s abortion laws. In 2005, the Center
won a landmark decision in K.L.
v. Peru before the United Nations Human Rights Committee, establishing
that access to abortion when it is legal is a human right. In addition, we submitted a friend-of-the-court brief
on comparative and international human rights in the 2006 Colombian
Constitutional Court decision legalizing abortion in cases to preserve a
woman’s life or physical or mental health, rape or incest, or fetal
abnormality.
Arango hails from Colombia and has worked at the Center since
2008. Before joining the Center, she was legal adviser to the Constitutional
Court of Colombia, worked with Women’s Link Worldwide, and the CIJUS at the
University of Los Andes.
