The American Convention on Human Rights: A Commentary

This book offers a systematic commentary on the principal human rights treaty of the inter-American system: the American Convention on Human Rights. The Convention was adopted in 1969, and has been ratified mostly by Latin American States, with 23 States Parties. The commentary provides an understanding of how the human rights protected by this treaty have been interpreted in the various cases examined by the protection bodies, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. It also explains the workings of the protection system, including the individual complaints mechanism.

"The American Convention on Human Rights, adopted within the framework of the Organization of American States, is the central and essential instrument of the inter-American human rights law as elaborated by the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights. This treaty, adopted on November 22, 1969, with now 23 States Parties, contains 82 articles that set out the rights and freedoms that States undertake to respect and protect, and establishes various protection mechanisms, including an individual complaints mechanism. This book offers a critical, systematic and exegetical commentary of the 82 Articles of this Convention, reflecting on the construction, often creative and avant-garde, of the inter-American human rights bodies. Doctrinal, critical and jurisprudential, this book is the fruit of reflections and research carried out by the two authors, and of a symbiotic writing. The American Convention on Human Rights is much more than just a treaty of international law. The Convention is a complex instrument, which was born in a particular context, and which reflects the inter-American human rights particularism. Of course, it is a political instrument, which was thought in the difficult context of the revolutionary fever of the late 1950s. But it is also, and above all, an instrument of progress and justice that is in line with the current of humanist thought of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the projects for the emancipation of the humankind. It is also a formidable legal instrument with exceptional normative power and potential. This treaty, as interpreted and applied by the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights, has become the founding norm of a creative, sophisticated and protective inter-American legal regime for the protection of human rights, thanks to audacious and intelligent hermeneutic work, led in particular by the Inter-American Court. The persuasive force of inter-American jurisprudence attests to its argumentative quality. This Inter-American human rights law, if it embodies the hope of access to justice for some, to truth for others, or to the protection of the most vulnerable, is also, for the internationalist lawyer, a paradigm of reference for what is and what must be public international law centered on humanist and progressive values."--