The Institutionalisation of the Multilateral Police Cooperation in the Americas: A Bottom-Up Approach to the Pathway of an Informal Government Network

Abstract

The Police Community of America – AMERIPOL was created in 2007, at the 3rd Meeting of Directors, Commanders and Chiefs of Police of Latin America and the Caribbean that took place in Bogotá, Colombia. At the end of this meeting, official delegates of 15 national police institutions signed AMERIPOL’s bylaws. This decision led to the creation of a government network with broad cooperation faculties that – even without an international treaty – has operated since 2007 as a multilateral police cooperation mechanism. States did not oppose AMERIPOL, and several international organisations, the European Union, private actors and police institutions outside the Americas established cooperative alliances with it. The peculiar scenario where police forces – not States – lead the institutionalisation of multilateral police cooperation in the Americas begs the question: is it possible to reconcile the particular political conjuncture of creation and consolidation of AMERIPOL with international law? In this article, I sustain that the harmonisation of that specific political context and legal theory is, indeed, possible by articulating Anne-Marie Slaughter’s disaggregated state interpretation of the transnational agency of domestic government institutions with Janet K. Levit’s Bottom-Up Approach to International Lawmaking. This theoretical proposition reconciles AMERIPOL’s informal origins with the legitimacy needed to participate in any lawmaking process.