The aim of this chapter is to explore the ways in which human dignity has been used as a legal concept across South American countries. The concept has high value, and has been central to (at least Western) legal thinking since the approval of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948 (Cançado Trindade 2008: 11). As all South American constitutions currently in force were established after the UDHR, we suggest that human dignity plays a central role in those constitutions as well, and thus in the legal orders of all countries on the South American continent.

In order to support this claim, this chapter will focus primarily on comparative constitutional law, but it will also look at selected examples of uses of the notion of dignity in other legal contexts. Our central contention is that the concept of human dignity has evolved as an axiological (as a core value or fundamental principle) and normative foundation (as a fundamental right or rule) of the legal systems of South American countries, and that, even though theoretically under-developed, the notion has been used extensively by lawyers and judges. This ‘under-comprehension’ of the concept, however, has led to the reduction of its normative value and even threatens to nullify it altogether, at least before the eyes of society at large (cf. Lorenzetti 1998: 166).