On October 16th, the Second Joint Committees (Senate and House of Representatives) passed the bill that stipulates the terms of accession of the Republic of Colombia to the Convention of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The bill will now be discussed in the plenary sessions of both chambers. If approved together, the bill will be passed into law and ready for presidential enactment.
The ratification of the “Agreement on the Terms of Accession of the Republic of Colombia to the Convention of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development” is a requirement for the formalization of Colombia’s membership in this international organization. The legislators in charge of presenting the initiative argued that being a member of the OECD means for Colombia to have a seal of guarantee, since the countries that are part of the OECD are recognized for having serious, responsible, transparent and fair policies; imposing and demanding the highest social and environmental standards from national and foreign investors; and influencing the global agenda and the decisions taken in all those spaces in which a cooperative and coordinated response is demanded from a plural number of countries.
The country has been in negotiations to join the bloc since 2013. Finally, the OECD approved Colombia’s entry into the international bloc May 25th. Former President of the Republic, Juan Manuel Santos, signed the country’s adhesion May 30th – when he was still in office- in order to enable the parliamentary process. Joining the OECD has been one of the priorities of Santos’ government, for whom “the accession process has set in motion processes of institutional reforms and has triggered very important internal reflections”.
The OECD was created in 1961 with the objective of promoting world trade and economic development. It currently has 37 member countries, of which -without taking Colombia into account- only two currently belong to Latin America and the Caribbean: Mexico (since 1994) and Chile (since 2010).