On 5 March 2026 the government declared a second state of economic, social and ecological emergency over the floods that hit eight departments — Córdoba, Antioquia, La Guajira, Sucre, Bolívar, Cesar, Magdalena and Chocó — and, under that declaration, issued a battery of sectoral legislative decrees. One of them, Legislative Decree 222 of 2026 from the Ministry of Transport, sought to speed up the reconstruction of roads and infrastructure damaged by the weather. Like every emergency decree, it became subject to automatic and comprehensive constitutional review by the Constitutional Court.
Its article 2 attempted to lift, for construction and supervision contracts aimed at the emergency, the cap limiting contract additions to 50% of the initial value set by the proviso to article 40 of Law 80 of 1993. It is the same rule that Legislative Decree 175 of 2026 had suspended months earlier for the agricultural flooding emergency, already covered in LuxIA's regulatory tracker. The logic is identical in both cases: once an emergency is declared, the government selectively loosens the General Procurement Statute so that entities can extend existing contracts instead of running new processes, which take longer than the urgency allows.
On 15 July 2026 the full bench of the Constitutional Court handed down Judgment C-211 of 2026, with Justice Miguel Polo Rosero as rapporteur and a vote of eight to zero (with a concurring opinion from Justice Jorge Enrique Ibáñez Najar). The Court upheld most of the decree — including the wider allowance for additions to construction contracts — but struck down the words "and supervision" in the first paragraph of article 2, and the whole of its second paragraph. In practice, entities may add to reconstruction-related construction contracts without the ordinary cap, but they cannot extend that same exception to supervision contracts, and the decree lost the additional reach the second paragraph gave it.
The underlying reason matters as much as the outcome. The Court reiterated that the government's exceptional power to alter the rules of Law 80 during a state of emergency is not a blank authorisation: it covers only what bears a direct connection to the rehabilitation phase of the declared emergency, and it does not extend by analogy to contractual arrangements the rule did not expressly mention. Construction and supervision are distinct objects, with distinct risks, and widening the allowance for supervision additions without specific justification went beyond that limit. The ruling also confined the decree's territorial scope to the municipalities certified by the National Disaster Risk Management Unit as affected by the weather of January and February 2026, and to those able to demonstrate additional specific harm.
For an entity that has already added more than 50% to an emergency supervision contract on the strength of Decree 222 of 2026, the judgment removes the legal basis for that addition from the moment the Court struck it down. For watchdogs and oversight bodies, the relevant question stops being "was there an emergency decree that allowed this?" and becomes "what exactly did that decree say, and how much of it survived the Court's review?" — because, as this case shows, one paragraph of an article can stand while the next falls. For suppliers performing construction or supervision under emergency declarations, whether this one or the agricultural emergency of Decree 175 of 2026 — which remains in force and has not been through this review — it is worth reading the decree as it stands after constitutional review, not only as originally published in the Diario Oficial.
The decision arrives in a year when scrutiny of emergency contracting and institutional transparency has grown more demanding. January closed the last month of direct contracting before the pre-election freeze with more than 521,000 contracts signed, according to the Contraloría, and in April the government issued Decree 382 of 2026 regulating the National Integrity System, adding Colombia Compra Eficiente as a permanent member of the body coordinating the fight against corruption across the public administration. Judgment C-211 belongs to that same trend: responding to a real emergency does not exempt state contracting from its ordinary controls, it merely adjusts, with precision, which ones are suspended, for which contractual object and for how long.
For anyone overseeing these contracts from outside, the practical difficulty is that very few public sources bring together in one place which parts of an emergency decree remain in force after the ruling that reviewed it. Cross-checking the original decree, the judgment that reviewed it and the contract as performed on SECOP is, today, manual work that most oversight groups have no time to repeat for every contract born under a declared emergency.