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Law and Politics in the Inter-American System

The Amnesty Cases

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Wayne Sandholtz  and
Mariana Rangel Padilla
Wayne Sandholtz*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
Mariana Rangel Padilla
Affiliation:
Tecnológico de Monterrey
*
Contact the corresponding author, Wayne Sandholtz, at wayne.sandholtz@usc.edu.
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Abstract

The Inter-American Human Rights System takes into account domestic political contexts in ways that sometimes have not been fully recognized. International human rights courts face a tension between the goal of expanding rights and the need to gain legitimacy with domestic constituencies. Cases involving national amnesty laws have posed this dilemma in acute fashion in the Inter-American System. An analysis of those cases and their domestic political contexts shows how the Commission and the Court have taken into account domestic circumstances, the first through the timing of referrals and the second through the Court’s jurisprudence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , Spring 2020 , pp. 151 - 175
Copyright
© 2020 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

The authors are grateful to participants in the Law and Globalization seminar at Yale Law School and in a panel at the Law and Society Association’s 2015 Annual Meeting for helpful discussions of an earlier version of this paper. The article also benefited from the constructive suggestions of Courtney Hillebrecht, Claret Vargas, Laurence Helfer, and three anonymous reviewers. Finally, for their outstanding research assistance, the authors thank Kyle Nothern, Benjamin Cohn, William Chandler, and Derek Belle.

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