Clarity and Compliance in the Inter American Human Rights System
This paper leverages a highly detailed, public monitoring system for decisions of the Inter American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) to test a model of judicial policy implementation. We model the clarity with which the Inter American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) expresses its remedies to human rights violations in the context of its contentious jurisdiction. We also model the reactions of states to these remedies. Our findings suggest that clarity lowers resistance to IACHR orders, yet uncertainty about the relationship between policy means and policy ends renders IACHR orders less clear. These findings are consistent with general claims in judicial politics about the interdependence of the judicial policy making process. They also suggest that international judicial reform efforts designed to advance judicial independence without considering the challenges of policy implementation are not only unlikely to succeed but misguided normatively. I have strongly recommended the Court to apply Article 65 again, so as to bring states that do not comply back to their duties of compliance with the judgments of the Court, but the Court's majority has preferred to take a pragmatic approach. I am against pragmatism in this domain of protection. I think that protection is a matter of principle and there is no room under the American Convention for pragmatism. Judge Antonio A. Cancado Trindade, former President of the Inter American Court of Human Rights, on the court's approach to state compliance.1