State’s jurisdictional structure (concentrated control) or assigned to diverse
jurisdictional bodies in the case of matters they hear pursuant to their respective
competences (diffuse control).
5.
In a similar way to that described in the preceding paragraph, there is a
control of “conventionality” deposited in international – or supranational – tribunals,
created by human rights conventions, which entrust these organs of the new regional
human rights justice with the interpretation and application of the respective treaties
and with ruling on facts that allegedly violate the obligations set out in the
conventions that give rise to the international responsibility of the State which
ratified the convention or acceded to it.
6.
Every day fewer questions are being raised about the binding or merely
indicatory nature of the rulings of the international human rights courts. I will not
examine here the possible value of the opinions issued by the latter in response to
this type of request. Rather, I refer to the rulings issued during or at the conclusion
of genuine proceedings, initiated on the basis of a dispute (litigation, in the
substantive sense) filed before the jurisdiction by whosoever may legitimately file a
complaint (in our case, pursuant to the American Convention, the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights or a State that has acknowledged the so-called
compulsory jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court). The American Convention
stipulates clearly – and there is widespread agreement on this point – that such
decisions are binding for the parties to the dispute. It is possible to go even further
when the proceedings deals with acts that, owing to their very nature, have a
objective sphere of application that exceeds the parties to the litigation: for example,
a law, as can be seen in the judgment on interpretation in the Barrios Altos case.
7.
Since the American Convention and the Statute of the Inter-American Court –
both of which are products of the normative intentions of the American States that
issued them – confer on the Court the function of interpreting and applying the
American Convention (and, if applicable and within its sphere, other treaties:
protocols and conventions that establish, with multiple formulas, the same
attribution within the human rights corpus juris), it is for the Court to establish the
meaning and scope of the norms contained in these international treaties.
8.
In keeping with the jurisdictional logic that underpins the Court’s
establishment and operation, it could not be considered that it would need to hear
hundreds or thousands of cases on a single treaty-based issue – which would involve
an enormous neglect of the individual – in other words, all the litigations that are
ever filed in all the countries, resolving one by one the facts that violate rights, and
guaranteeing, also one by one, the specific rights and freedoms. The only reasonable
possibility of protection implies that once the “interpretation and application criteria”
have been established, the States will include them in their legal system, through
policies, laws and judgments that give transcendence, universality and effectiveness
to the rulings of the Court, which was established – I insist – through the sovereign
will of the States, to uphold their basic decisions, explicit in their national
constitutions and, evidently, in their international treaty-based commitments.
9.
Fortunately, in recent years – during which there has been a notable
development of diverse elements of the inter-American system for the protection of
human rights, including the jurisdictional aspect – that idea has prevailed explicitly
and increasingly. Every day more high-ranking national courts accept it. The national