The American Convention on Human Rights

Abstract

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 twenty-three States Parties, contains eighty-two 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. However, the American Convention is much more than an international treaty. 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 adopted in the difficult context of the revolutionary fever of the late 1960s. It is also, and above all, an instrument of progress and justice, with an unequivocal purpose of emancipation of humankind. The Convention is finally a formidable legal instrument. This treaty, as interpreted and applied by the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights, has become the legal basis of a creative, sophisticated, and protective inter-American legal regime of human rights. This inter-American human rights law, whether it embodies the hope of access to justice and equality for some, to truth for others, or to the protection of the most vulnerable, is also, for the lawyer, a paradigm for what is and what must be public international law centered on humanist and progressive values.