Anna Luisa Walter de Santana (Pontifical Catholic University of Parana) and Jorge Ernesto Roa-Roa (Universidad Externado de Colombia) have posted The Power of Advice: The Deliberative Turn of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law (MPIL) Research Paper No. 2026-07 on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is undergoing the most significant institutional transformation in fifty years. This chapter argues that the Inter-American Human Rights System has moved from a contentious, coercive paradigm to a deliberative one, in which the Court’s authority is measured less by judgments and more by the regional deliberation each advisory process awakens. Reconstructing the Court’s trajectory in three stages —a foundational advisory period, a contentious era that built the Ius Constitutionale Commune of Latin America (ICCAL), and the current advisory revolution— it shows that the most consequential regional standards of the last decade arrived not through individual victims, but through advisory opinions: gender identity, asylum, the (impossible) denunciation of the American Convention, labour rights, persons deprived of liberty and the climate emergency. Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 —the advisory opinion on the survival of the species— is the highest expression of this turn. The chapter also warns against an advisory era’s dangers —geopolitical instrumentalization and selective domestic reception— and defends a Court grounded in its passive virtues: rigour in admissibility, deference in dialogue and serious recognition of their binding force. From San José, the advisory revolution opens a horizon of legitimate hope when force seeks to replace law.
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