The Challenging and Challenged Authority of International Courts

Abstract

The proliferation of international courts has been labelled: “the single most important development of the post-Cold War age”. Indeed, for about three decades, the world has witnessed a stunning increase of political salience of the international judiciary, particularly of Regional International Courts (RICs). New and old RICs have been established and/or reformed in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. These institutions have produced important judicial decisions which have casted a large shadow on national, regional, and international legal as well as political domains (i.e., trade policies, human/fundamental rights, mega-politics, and democratization). The current alteration of the national and international political climate that followed the economic and refugee crises, together with the re-shuffling of the geopolitical equilibrium and with the global rise of populism and protectionism, however, have caused a significant backlash against international law and courts. This backlash was embodied in a variety of attempts to undermine the authority and legitimacy of international courts and organizations. The panel explores the systemic, political, historical and institutional factors at the origins of the political pushback against RICs, together with the eventual responses that these institutions have developed to enhance and defend their challenged authority and power. The contributors will provide empirical evidence from RICs in order to create a nuanced picture of the commonalities and differences of the experienced trajectories. We will focus on the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the Central American Court of Justice (CACJ) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR).