Victims and prosecutors in the case against Colombia???s former president, Alvaro Uribe, requested more time to appeal the sentence that absolved the far-right politician of fraud and bribery charges.

Presidential candidate Ivan Cepeda, former justice minister Eduardo Montealegre, and delegate prosecutor before the Supreme Court of Justice Marlene Orjuela formally requested the 30-day extension to file an appeal before the Supreme Court.

The prosecution argued that the decisions of the first and second instances and the dissenting vote are more than two thousand pages in total, and need to be ???studied and analyzed with the utmost care to satisfy the argumentative burden required by the extraordinary appeal.???

In a ruling of more than 700 pages, the Superior Tribunal of Bogota ruled that the prosecution failed to prove that Uribe led a criminal conspiracy that sought to frustrate investigations into his family???s alleged ties to paramilitary groups.

Consequently, the appeals court absolved Uribe of all charges and revoked a 12-year prison sentence imposed on the former president by the lower court.

The court???s reasons to absolve Uribe

1. The appeals court said that some of the wiretaps that were used by the Supreme Court to open a formal investigation against Uribe were obtained illegally. According to the appeals court, the Supreme Court and the lower court that tried the former president ought to have suppressed conversations Uribe had on a phone other than his own as evidence.
2. The testimony of jailed former paramilitary commander Luis Carlos Velez, who testified that he received bribes from Uribe???s fixer, self-proclaimed ???gangsta attorney??? Diego Cadena, lacked credibility.
3. Evidence of payments made to another former paramilitary commander, Euridice Cortes, failed to prove bribery as they could be interpreted as legitimate compensations for made expenses.
4. The appeals court ruled that former paramilitary fighter Juan Guillermo Monsalve, who has long claimed that Uribe and his brother Santiago helped create the Bloque Metro paramilitary group, lacked credibility. Monsalve filmed Cadena pressuring him to retract his accusations against the Uribe brothers.
5. The court also ruled that Uribe was not responsible for false testimonies that supported criminal charges against Senator Ivan Cepeda. These charges were dismissed by the Supreme Court, which opened the investigation into Uribe.

The ruling was opposed by one of the three judges. In her dissenting opinion, this judge said that the lower court???s ruling should have been confirmed by her colleagues.

Cepeda, whose attorneys have been on top of the criminal proceedings since they began in 2018, said that he would take the case to the Supreme Court.