Since the explosion of the human rights movement in the early 1970s, civil-society organizations have played a key role in the inter-American human rights system (IAS). In the era of dictatorships, they provided the information necessary for the Inter-American Commission to be able to act in the face of uncooperative states. When democracy returned to the region, these organizations grew in number, and their role within the IAS likewise expanded. In particular, a set of organizations that focused on legal strategies and the activation of regional human rights protection mechanisms cropped up. These organizations have, at a more abstract and general level, contributed to the juridification of human rights struggles and ultimately to the creation of a legal field. They have also largely set the agenda of the IAS, although the agenda-setting power has been limited to a small number of organizations that constitute the system's “repeat players.” In a manner befitting their systemic importance, these organizations have tried to make sure the organs of the IAS run smoothly, and to defend them when they come under attack. This essay explores the different roles that human rights NGOs have played in the history of the IAS and suggests that the strategy of increasing juridification that they have pursued since the region's return to democracy might have reached its limits.

Christian Evangelicals are a growing political force in Latin America. Most recently, they have engaged the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to challenge basic LGBTI achievements, such as same-sex marriage and other demands for equal rights. Several commentators thus speak of an imminent showdown between human rights protections and Christian Evangelism in the region, which would mirror similar conflicts elsewhere in the world. This essay challenges this narrative and warns against a top-down “secular fundamentalism,” which may alienate a significant part of the region's population and create deep resentment against the Court. As it turns forty, the Court faces a “spiritual” crisis: conservative religious movements have become one of its key interlocutors, with demands and expectations that compete with (but could also complement) those of other regional social movements. Difficult as it may be, the Court needs to be bold in creating argumentative spaces that allow for the Evangelical experience to exist in the public sphere in Latin America, in a context of respect for human rights in general, and for LGBTI rights in particular.

A decade ago, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a landmark judgment in the case of González and Others (“Cotton Field”) v. Mexico, which addressed the abduction and subsequent sexual murder of three young women in the industrial border city of Ciudad Juárez—a place known for systematic gender violence and impunity. For the victims’ next of kin and the feminist and human rights activists involved in the litigation, the murders constituted feminicidios (feminicides). The resulting judgment has been celebrated not only for developing new standards for women's human rights internationally, but also for its domestic impact in the form of innovative feminist laws and policies in Mexico and other Latin American countries. With a focus on Cotton Field’s impact on Mexico, this essay explores the potential rise of the “formally feminist state”—a state that adopts domestic feminist legislation and policies but then resists their implementation—as a new player on the stage of the inter-American human rights system (IAS). Drawing on insights from American sociolegal analyses on judicial deference to the presence of policies and institutional mechanisms as indicators of compliance with antidiscrimination laws, I suggest that this new player may create a different set of challenges for courts in assessing states’ lack of compliance with norms on women's human rights.

The inter-American human rights system (IAS) faces a region that has turned distinctly hostile to human rights. For many, the ongoing crisis in Venezuela is ground zero, demonstrating the ineffectiveness of international human rights when confronted with an entrenched regime supported by major powers such as Russia and China. In this multipolar world, reinforced by a transactional and antiliberal U.S. foreign policy, human rights concerns seem to have little salience. Moreover, the regional Right-wing trend and the so-called populist resurgence underpin a political vision in the Americas that is distinctly antirights. And to make matters worse, some argue, we are anyway in the end-times of human rights—the age of international courts and liberal cosmopolitanism is over. While recognizing that these overlapping political trends pose clear challenges to the IAS, this essay offers a more cool-headed analysis to suggest that the system's future is likely to be less apocalyptic than the doomsayers predict. The first part of the essay takes a sober look at the multiple political challenges facing the IAS today and their implications for human rights advocacy. In the second part, against the background of the inhospitable conditions facing human rights activists in the region, I highlight the role of civil-society actors in strengthening and embedding the IAS. As it is precisely the regional embeddedness of the IAS on which the system's future hinges, the third part highlights the need not only to defend progress, but also to strengthen resilience.

In 2009, as the American Convention on Human Rights turned forty, Left-wing governments ruled in almost all Latin American countries. The democratization wave that began in the late 1980s had produced a seemingly hegemonic turn to the Left—the so-called “Pink Tide.” A decade later, the political landscape was radically different. With only a few exceptions, Right-wing governments are in power throughout Latin America. The implications of the conservative wave have been felt in a number of areas—including human rights. This essay explores the ways in which the new conservative governments of Latin American have tried to curb the inter-American human rights system and examines the potential long-term consequences that their efforts may have on the regional system and the protection of human rights. It then suggests possible avenues for sound engagement between states and the system, observing that the Inter-American Court's expansive case law may cause more harm in the long run.

A topic motivating much research since 2016 is the turn away from international law caused by a surge in non-liberal and nationalist governments across the world. In the realm of human rights law, scholars have noted how states are now more apt to repudiate, resist, or simply ignore their human rights obligations. This essay makes a different cut into this topic. It considers not how non-liberal actors reject human rights law, but rather what happens when they embrace it. International human rights law in Latin America—often understood as a means of promoting a cosmopolitan, liberal political order—is also being harnessed toward other types of political projects. This raises the question of how necessary the link is between human rights and political liberalism: is non-liberal engagement an existential threat, or can human rights law have a thinner commitment to liberal principles than does, for example, national constitutional law? As the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) turns fifty, this essay argues that the human rights law of the Americas is open-ended enough that it can incorporate, and has at times incorporated, non-liberal concerns and norms without losing coherence or legitimacy. Further, this may be an apt survival strategy, albeit not the only one, for the region's human rights institutions in our time.