This article challenges the justification usually offered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for its broad use of external sources when engaging in evolutive interpretation of the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR). It analyses the Court's jurisprudence concerning international humanitarian law, the rights of the child, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual and intersex (LGBTI) rights, in addition to drawing on interviews conducted with lawyers of the Court. It argues that the discursive strategy used by the Court to justify its ‘import’ of external sources fails to provide a complete normative justification and remains open to the charge of ‘cherry-picking’. The article recommends that the Court tailors its discursive strategy to the specific type of external sources used and suggests that more attention be paid to searching for internationalized consensus when determining the relevance of non-binding sources to evolutive interpretation of the ACHR.

Cet article traite des droits à la liberté de réunion pacifique et d’association tels que garantis dans le système interaméricain de protection des droits humains. Il traite d’abord des dispositions de la Convention américaine relative aux droits de l’homme se rapportant à ces droits, de même que de leur importance pour les sociétés démocratiques et la jouissance des autres droits. Il est ensuite question de la nature positive et négative des obligations qu’ont les états en la matière, puis des limites acceptables de ces libertés dans les sociétés libres et démocratiques. Il analyse l’exercice de ces droits par certains groupes particuliers, dont les défenseurs des droits humains, les leaders autochtones, les sympathisants de partis politiques et les membres d’organisations syndicales. Il est également question de l’importance, pour une société démocratique, de laisser s’exprimer ces divers groupes, pour qui les activités associatives et les démonstrations publiques constituent des moyens privilégiés d’exprimer de leurs points de vue et de participer aux affaires publiques. En se référant aux principes abordés dans les parties précédentes, cet article traite finalement de la criminalisation de la contestation civile dans les Amériques, à la lumière des événements récents au Nicaragua, au Chili, et en Bolivie.

The Dominican Republic (DR) filed its declaration accepting the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Inter-American Court or Court) on March 22, 1999, and since then has been the subject of four judgments and a series of provisional measures. On November 4, 2014, however, the Constitutional Tribunal of the Dominican Republic (Tribunal) declared unconstitutional the government’s declaration accepting jurisdiction, implying that the Dominican Republic is not now, and perhaps never has been, under the Inter-American Court’s jurisdiction.

On August 21, 2012, the Mexican Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Article 57 of the Mexican Code of Military Justice (CMJ) and in doing so complied with several judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (I/A Court). From the point of view of Mexican law, the Supreme Court’s decision means that civilians who have suffered from the unconstitutional expansion of military jurisdiction in Mexico are, for the first time, protected by the federal judiciary. More significant from the perspective of international law, the decision to bring Mexican law into compliance with the judgments of the I/A Court reflects growing acceptance of that Court’s judgments, and international human rights law, by the states parties to the American Convention on Human Rights (American Convention), as well as the general decline of military jurisdiction and impunity in the region.