Every year the Senate’s Sección de Leyes publishes an account of what it did with the bills in front of it. This year’s runs to 387 pages and tracks 379 of them, one card each, with the dates on which each cleared each of the four debates a Colombian bill must survive. Read as a table rather than as a document, it shows that of the 77 bills that arrived from the Cámara de Representantes, 42 were archived when the legislature closed on 20 June — and that for 18 of those, the Senate recorded no first-debate approval date at all.
The 18 are not obscure procedural leftovers. Eight are commemorative: a municipal anniversary, Holy Week on the Caribbean coast, the Fiesta de San Pacho, honours to a nineteenth-century politician, recognition of a Colombian horse breed. The other ten are substantive, and two of them had constituencies. Bill 587 of 2025 is the overhaul of ICETEX, the state student-loan agency, which the Chamber approved in plenary on 30 September 2025; the Senate named eight ponentes to it and recorded nothing further. Bill 321 of 2024 is Ley Olimpia, extending the criminal law on sexual violence to digital conduct; the Chamber passed it on 1 October 2025 and named a Senate ponente.
What the record does not establish is that no vote happened. The Senate’s report leaves the first-debate field blank in cases where a vote demonstrably did occur: of the 68 bills in the same document that reached law or presidential signature, five have that field empty too. A committee that votes to shelve a bill produces no approval date either. So the finding is what the Senate recorded, not what it did — and what it recorded, for 18 bills the other chamber had already passed, is nothing.
The waiting is long by any reading. Counting from the day after the Chamber’s plenary vote to 20 June 2026, the median bill sat 284 calendar days, and 195 of them were days on which the Senate was in ordinary session. Sixteen of the 18 had at least one complete session period — 97 days — available to them. The longest wait belongs to bill 163 of 2024, an entrepreneurship fund for Afro-Colombian communities, approved by the Chamber on 4 June 2025: 381 calendar days, 263 of them sitting days. Across the 18, the Senate had 3,248 days of ordinary session in which to hold a first-debate vote and held none it recorded.
The mechanism that finished them is Article 190 of Ley 5 of 1992, whose operative sentence is four words long in translation: no bill shall be considered in more than two legislatures. All 18 were filed as 2024–2025 bills, which made the 2025–2026 session their second and last. Seventeen of the 18 carry the Chamber’s own note recording exactly that — “ARCHIVADO ARTÍCULO 190 LEY 5 DE 1992” — which means the Chamber’s registry independently agrees they expired rather than lost.
The eighteenth is Ley Olimpia, and the two chambers disagree about it. The Senate’s report lists it as archived; the Chamber’s live file still shows it pending in the Senate. That is not the only disagreement: on eight of the 42 bills the two registries diverge, including two that the Chamber says reached presidential signature.
Timing gave one of them an awkward afterlife. Honorio Henríquez Pinedo, of the Centro Democrático, is among the authors of the ICETEX bill. On 20 July 2026 — a month after it was archived — he was elected President of the Senate for the 2026–2027 legislative year. He did not preside over the chamber during the session days in which his own bill sat unvoted.
The aggregate picture was already public. The Senate archived 239 bills in total last legislature, and 184 of them carry no approval date at any of the four debates; the totals were reported in the Colombian press in early July. What the report has not been read for until now is the breakdown by chamber of origin — which bills came up from the Cámara already carrying a majority, and how long they then sat.