Jurisdicción agraria y rural y decreto 797 de 2025 como arquitectura institucional para la gobernanza y la justicia de tierras en Colombia

Abstract

The research investigates whether the Agrarian and Rural Jurisdiction and Decree 797 of 2025, as a development of Law 160 of 1994, constitute an institutional arrangement that is compatible with the Constitution and capable of addressing persistent flaws in Colombia's land regime. The analysis starts from an agrarian conflict marked by dispossession, concentration, and territorial inequality, in which regulatory production has not always offered clear paths for those claiming rights. It also shows that the proliferation of regimes and procedures has led to overlaps, so that the same property can be interpreted, depending on the case, as vacant land, private property, a protected area, or a peasant reserve zone, which increases uncertainty and the costs of institutional navigation. This fragmentation is reflected in the division of powers between entities such as the National Land Agency, the Restitution Unit, the Superintendency of Notaries and Registries, the IGAC, and environmental authorities, in addition to jurisdictional responses that do not always converge. With this diagnosis, the new legislative initiatives establish constitutional requirements for evaluating the redesign, arguing that specialization is only justified if it reduces conflicts of jurisdiction and prevents rural citizens from becoming trapped in successive referrals. Within this framework, Legislative Act 03 of 2023 is being studied as an express authorization of the Agrarian and Rural Jurisdiction, with a mandate to ensure effective access to justice and enhanced protection for peasants, ethnic groups, and victims. The examination of effective access emphasizes entry into the system, processing with territorial understanding, and the material execution of decisions, showing how congestion and dispersion prolong legal uncertainty. At the same time, it analyzes that legal certainty depends on consistency between the cadastre, registry, and administrative files, as this is where the identification of the property and the traceability of records are defined. Finally, the institutional comparison points out that Decree 797 of 2025 reorganizes restitution procedures through a special program, the assignment of tasks among entities, provisional deliveries communicated to the judge, and rules for information exchange, with the aim of making the sequence between application, delivery, and award controllable.