On September 14, 2026, Carolina Bejarano Martínez, Senior Research Fellow at the MPIL and Academic Coordinator of the ICCAL Lab on Democratic Resilience in Europe and Latin America, presented her analysis of the public hearings on the advisory opinion requested by Guatemala on the right to democracy at the Institute’s Montagsrunde.

The Human Rights Community of Practice in Defense of Democracy

The question Guatemala put to the Inter-American Court in December 2024 can be stated simply: whether states are obligated to protect and promote democracy as a right in itself, as a condition for the enjoyment of other rights, or as both. The hearings were held in Brasília between March 17 and 20, 2026, as part of the Court’s 187th session.

The presentation proposed reading the hearings as a space of communication between the Court and the inter-American community of practice, drawing on the concept developed by Armin von Bogdandy and René Urueña to describe the transnational community of courts, litigants, officials, and scholars that produces and develops human rights practice in Latin America. From that perspective, what happens in the courtroom is not merely the Court receiving information, but the collective articulation of a shared legal language.

The scale of the proceeding reflects the density of that community. The process received 215 written submissions, and the Court heard 120 delegations over more than forty hours of hearings. Seven states took part, including Guatemala as the requesting state, which opened and closed the hearing, as well as Brazil, Colombia, the United States, Mexico, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Also participating were the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Inter-American Commission of Women, the OAS Secretariat for the Strengthening of Democracy, UN Women, and the Venice Commission, alongside public defenders' and ombudsman’s offices from across the region. The Court set aside dedicated blocks for states and for judicial institutions, reflecting the weight it assigned to their positions. These were joined by delegations from universities, legal clinics, civil society organizations, and individuals appearing in their own name.

Multilevel Dialogue and the Horizontal Construction of Common Law

The participation of constitutional courts and electoral tribunals was central to the analysis. The Constitutional Court of Colombia, the Constitutional Court of Peru, the Supreme Court of Justice of Panama, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal of Guatemala, and the Superior Electoral Court of Paraguay were heard in a single block, in a deliberate exercise of judicial dialogue. Their presence shows that the regional meaning of democracy is built horizontally, among institutions that each bring their own constitutional experience and their own reading of democratic risk.

A Paradigm Shift

The presentation also examined the questions judges posed at the close of each block. Read together, they reveal a productive counterpoint: while the delegations argued for expanding the content of democracy, the Court probed the scope of that protection and the limits of its own competence. Bejarano Martínez suggested that both the advisory opinion on the climate emergency (AO-32/25) and the one the Court will issue on the right to democracy point to a paradigm shift in the language of human rights: their object is no longer only the protection of individuals against grave violations, but the guarantee of the conditions under which human rights can be realized.