The Coloquio Iberoamericano No. 353, organized by the Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina (ICCAL) project at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) in Heidelberg, devoted its session to examining conventionality control through the experience of Ecuador’s constitutional jurisdiction. The speakers were Justices Alejandra Cárdenas Reyes, Sandra Cordero, and Claudia Salgado Levy. The colloquium turned on a practical question: what changes in how cases are decided once inter-American standards become part of a domestic court’s ordinary reasoning. The session showed that, twenty years after it was first formulated, conventionality control remains the concept that best captures how inter-American law enters the legal life of states.

From International Obligation to Everyday Judicial Practice

Beginning in 2006, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held that domestic authorities must apply not only ratified treaties but also the regional court’s own interpretation of them. What was first framed as a duty addressed to judges later expanded to public authorities as a whole, and shifted from a mandate to disapply norms contrary to the Convention toward a standard of consistent interpretation that operates before any finding of incompatibility. Conventionality control thus stopped being discussed as a question of normative hierarchy and came to be discussed as a question of judicial practice: how courts argue with inter-American standards, at what point in their reasoning those standards enter, and what weight they carry against other sources.

Open Statehood and the Block of Constitutionality

A theme running through the session was that the reception of inter-American law depends not only on courts' willingness but on the constitutional architecture that enables it. Opening clauses, the direct application of rights recognized in international instruments, and placing human rights treaties on the same hierarchical footing as the constitution together form what ICCAL has termed open statehood. Where that scaffolding exists, as in Ecuador, conventionality control is applied with little doctrinal resistance and is read as a requirement of domestic constitutional law itself.

The notion of the block of constitutionality performs a translating function here. It allows the inter-American standard to be invoked in the language and with the authority of the national constitution, which lowers the argumentative cost of using it and eases its circulation down to trial judges and administrative bodies.

Appropriation: From Citing Inter-American Case Law to Deciding With It

The most visible advance of these two decades of conventionality control in Ecuador lies not in the volume of citations but in the kind of work the Court does with them. Three uses recur. The first is filling gaps: figures recognized in the constitutional text that had never received judicial development gain content and scope from regional standards. The second is handling evidence in contexts of serious violations, where standards on the burden of proof and context analysis allow the Court to sustain findings that ordinary evidentiary rules would make difficult. The third is transformative reparation, with measures of satisfaction, guarantees of non-repetition, and institutional obligations around training and internal reform. That shift, from formal application to creative appropriation, is what allows one to speak of a real impact of the inter-American system on domestic case law.

Nor is the dialogue bilateral. Alongside inter-American standards, courts in the region also draw on universal instruments such as CEDAW, compare their case law with that of other regional courts, and even invoke the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. That pluralism of sources sits at the core of ICCAL’s approach: comparison does not aim to standardize, but to identify shared problems and the responses already available.

Equality, Inclusion, and the Limits of the Model

The incorporation of a gender perspective into Ecuadorian constitutional case law was the clearest example of conventionality control’s transformative potential. Removing stereotypes from judicial decisions, dismantling barriers to women’s access to justice, and the premise that proceedings must not become a site of revictimization all show how the inter-American standard shapes institutional practice, not merely case outcomes.

Open tensions remain. How constitutional law, international human rights law, and regimes such as international investment arbitration fit together still lacks a settled answer, and questions persist about the sustainability of these advances amid democratic erosion. The colloquium left these discussions on the table as a shared research agenda.