In this study, we conducted a contrastive, translation-oriented analysis of the term acción de tutela in the Spanish, English and French versions of the Decisions and Views issued by the United Nations Human Rights Committee to which Colombia is a State Party. This study is motivated by the difficulties posed by the translation of cultural-bound terms in the context of legal and institutional translation and is supported by different academic studies that have addressed this issue. Towards our objective, we made a thorough legal characterization of acción de tutela and compared it with other alternative judicial defense mechanisms existing in the Spanish-speaking, French-speaking and English-speaking world. Then, framed in a mixed methodology from an empirical approach, we built two parallel bilingual subcorpus in order to evaluate whether the terminological choices in English and French preserved the meaning of the term acción de tutela in Colombian constitutional procedural law, based on the adequacy to the discursive situation. This allowed us to reach important conclusions on the impact of both the translation procedures that were applied and the intratextual coherence of the source text on the translation solutions of acción de tutela in international law documents.