The Rise of the Inter-American Human Rights Regime: No Longer a Unicorn, Not Yet an Ox
Author(s)
Farer, Tom J.
Abstract
If human rights regimes confirmed the dictum of the Modernist Movement in architecture–“Form follows Function”–then, anatomically speaking, the Inter-American one should resemble the European about as much as the unicorn resembles the ox. By associating the European regime with an ox, I intend not to insult but rather to celebrate its solid bourgeois virtues: the stolid, efficient application of energy and the consequently consistent production of effective decisions, all within the context of an orderly, stable, and prosperous community. The post-war West European setting did not invite, nor did it require, unpredictable improvisation or heroic challenges to the expectations and desires of governing elites. Latin America, by comparison, has been a feral jungle for most of the Inter-American regime’s remarkable life. And although today most of the beasts have withdrawn to their lairs (when they are not off exercising their human right to visit Miami and shop at Gucci) passersby still see eyes gleaming angrily in the shadows and hear the tense scrape of claws across stony floors. When, in the second half of the 1970s, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (Commission) began in earnest to test the limits of its authority–descending on countries, probing their viscera, and returning with graphic accounts of the stench–it appeared as a fabulous creature to two sets of observers. One was composed by the regimes carrying out murderous political projects. How, they must have wondered, could this organ of an association of governments, they not least among them, implicitly consecrated at birth to the defense of the West against the very revolutionary forces they were busily repressing, be calling them to account? How could these conservatively dressed, middle-aged gentlemen, nominated and elected by the region’s regimes, be harshly indicting various of their electors? It was Dr. Frankenstein and his monster all over again.
