The Inter-American Court of Human Rights must recognize democracy as an autonomous right before democratic erosion becomes irreparable.
In 2024, Guatemala asked the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to issue an advisory opinion on whether democracy should be recognized as an autonomous human right. The Court has now entered a decisive phase in its consideration: it held public hearings in March and will now deliberate before issuing its advisory opinion.
If the hearings are any indication, the Court is skeptical of framing democracy as a human right. Such doubt echoes public commentary on the proceedings. The judges broadly agreed that democracy matters in the Inter-American system. At issue in the hearings was whether the Court can effectively define and protect democracy as an independent right without overstepping its judicial role and what practical value such recognition would add.
This skepticism is unfounded. An autonomous right to democracy is already embedded in the Inter-American system, and the time has come for the Court to say so plainly. The system now urgently needs it.
The added value of an autonomous right to democracy
Throughout the hearings, the Court repeatedly returned to a central question: what would a proposed right to democracy add to the human rights framework not already provided by existing rights? A similar fear of the right’s redundancy has surfaced online, the latest manifestation of a long-running debate over human rights “inflation.”
The region’s main human rights instrument, the American Convention on Human Rights, protects more than twenty civil and political rights, ranging from the right to life and humane treatment to freedom of expression, assembly, and political participation. This scope has allowed the Convention to respond to discrete anti-democratic abuses, including electoral exclusion, political disqualification, and the removal of elected officials.
Yet the Convention has proved ill-equipped to confront democracy’s slow collapse in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua, where the breakdown unfolded gradually and was not triggered by a single, easily identifiable violation.
The Convention’s framework does not treat democracy itself as an independently protected legal interest, and the law offers no clear standard for when its erosion becomes a violation. This lacuna enables autocrats to dismantle democratic life piece by piece until it is too late to reverse course.
An autonomous right to democracy closes that gap. Recognizing democracy as an autonomous right would allow the Court to respond to democratic collapse as a legal wrong in its own right rather than only addressing it piecemeal through findings under other provisions.
