On March 26, 2021, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found Honduras responsible for the killing of Vicky Hernández, a trans woman and human rights defender.1 The Vicky Hernández et al. v. Honduras judgment is the first in which an international court has protected a trans woman by applying a human rights treaty that protects women. It thus provides an opportunity to analyze the impact of feminist ideas on the system of human rights protection at the regional level, with implications for international law more generally. In this essay, I defend the Inter-American Court's majority decision against the dissenting opinions, by arguing that the political subject of human rights is dynamic and emergent and, therefore, positive law is often one step behind in the struggles for recognition. For this reason, we need interpretations of rights that are inclusive, that evolve, and that push for the destabilization of law as binary, allowing the emergence of a more egalitarian legal system that recognizes intersectionality.

Luego de la Tercera Conferencia Mundial contra el Racismo, la Discriminación Racial, la Xenofobia y las Formas Relacionadas con la Intolerancia, realizada por las Naciones Unidas en Durban, Sudáfrica, en 2001, surgió un importante movimiento. Las comunidades de la diáspora africana en las Américas —o “afrodescendientes”, como prefieren autoidentificarse— comenzaron a buscar reconocimiento legal en el contexto del Derecho internacional de los derechos humanos, y especialmente dentro del sistema interamericano de derechos humanos. El progreso ha sido notable, incluidos distintos fallos de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, los cambios en los sistemas constitucionales y legales de los países de América Latina y el proyecto de las Naciones Unidas de la Declaración Internacional de los Derechos de los Afrodescendientes, como parte del Decenio Internacional de los Afrodescendientes (2015–2024). Sin embargo, todavía existen cuestiones conceptuales, técnicas y doctrinarias en la definición y estatus jurídico de los afrodescendientes bajo el Derecho internacional. ¿Quiénes son afrodescendientes en términos legales? Y, ¿cómo entendemos “afrodescendencia” dentro del contexto de los pueblos indígenas y tribales? En este ensayo, explico cómo diferentes organismos regionales en América Latina han interpretado progresivamente los derechos indígenas para superar la marginación de los afrodescendientes y describo algunos temas importantes que siguen sin estar claros a pesar de esta bienvenida evolución.

After the Third World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, held by the United Nations in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, an important movement emerged. The African diaspora communities in the Americas, or “Afro-descendants,” as they prefer to self-identify, began to seek legal recognition in the context of international human rights law, and especially within the inter-American human rights system. Progress has been remarkable, including the rulings of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, changes in the constitutional and legal systems of Latin American countries, and a UN draft of a Declaration of the Rights of People of African Descent, as part of the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015–2024). However, conceptual, technical, and doctrinal issues still exist in defining the legal agency of people of African descent under international law. Who are Afro-descendants in legal terms, and how do we understand “Afro-descendance” within the context of Indigenous and tribal peoples? In this essay, I explain how different regional bodies in Latin America have interpreted Indigenous rights progressively to overcome the marginalization of Afro-descendants, and address some important questions that remain unclear despite this welcome evolution.

La literatura sobre el Derecho internacional suele asumir que la relación del populismo con este último es antagónica1. Sin embargo, una perspectiva centrada en América Latina, donde el populismo ha sido estudiado desde principios del siglo veinte, complejiza esta noción: líderes populistas han adoptado el multilateralismo, promovido la unidad regional e intentado crear instituciones internacionales. Además, tanto populistas como nopopulistas han resistido instituciones internacionales. Este ensayo problematiza la asunción de una relación necesariamente antagónica entre el populismo y el Derecho internacional, sosteniendo que dicha asunción carece de sustento empírico y está teóricamente subdesarrollada. Latinoamérica es un lugar relevante para problematizar esta noción, debido al rol del Poder Ejecutivo en la conducción de relaciones exteriores2 y la rica historia intelectual en la región respecto del populismo. El ensayo enfatiza la necesidad de desarrollar un marco teórico adecuado para el estudio de la relación entre populismo y Derecho internacional, marco que debiese ser menos eurocéntrico y sesgado normativamente, sin asumir que la resistencia al Derecho internacional siempre carece de mérito. Adicionalmente, debería permitirnos identificar lo distintivamente populista en esta relación y qué aspectos están mediados por las ideologías huésped.

International legal scholarship often assumes that populists will have an antagonistic relationship with international law.1 But a view from Latin America, where populism has been an object of study since the early twentieth century, tells a more complex story: populist leaders have engaged in multilateralism, promoted regional unity, and attempted to create international institutions. And populists as well as non-populists have resisted international institutions. This essay questions the assumption that populists have an antagonistic relationship with international law, and argues that this assumption lacks robust empirical support and is theoretically underdeveloped. Latin America is a particularly significant site for challenging this assumption, given the prominent role of the executive in foreign relations2 and the rich intellectual history regarding populism itself. The essay concludes by stressing the need for developing a theoretical framework for the study of populism and international law, which international legal scholarship currently lacks. Such a framework should be less Euro-centric and less normatively biased: it should not assume that resistance to international law is always without merit. And it should also allow us to identify what is distinctively populist about populism's relation with international law and which aspects are mediated by populism's host ideologies.

Una propuesta de Reglamento europeo de 2021 prohíbe el comercio de materias primas y productos relacionados con la deforestación en el mercado de la Unión Europa1. El Reglamento europeo dirige esta prohibición hacia su propio mercado, pero inevitablemente esto tiene consecuencias para los países productores de materias primas en América Latina. La propuesta de Reglamento impactará el intercambio con la Unión Europa, un socio comercial clave para los países latinoamericanos. Si otros Estados industrializados que representan actualmente la cuota más grande de exportaciones para los países latinoamericanos adoptan este tipo de reglamentos, el impacto comercial en América Latina será aún más significativo. Sostenemos que los enfoques regulatorios que se centran en las cadenas de suministro globales —como el Reglamento UE— representan una oportunidad para fortalecer la existente (aunque débil) cooperación ambiental latinoamericana, de manera de abordar las principales causas de la deforestación, principalmente la expansión agrícola. A pesar de la relevancia global de los bosques y la biodiversidad de la región, la cooperación latinoamericana en materia de conservación de bosques no ha sido significativa2.

An EU Regulation proposed in 2021 prohibits the trading of deforestation-linked commodities and products on the EU market.1 The Regulation aims this ban at its own market, but it has unavoidable consequences for commodity producing Latin American countries. The proposed Regulation will affect trade with the European Union, a key trade partner for Latin American countries. If this type of regulation is increasingly adopted by other industrialized countries, which currently represent the largest share of exports for Latin American countries, the trade impact in Latin America will be even broader. We argue that regulatory approaches focused on global supply chains—such as the EU Regulation—represent an opportunity to reinvigorate existing, albeit weak, Latin American environmental cooperation to tackle key drivers of deforestation, notably, agricultural expansion. Despite the global relevance of the region's forests and biodiversity, Latin American cooperation has not been significant in forest conservation.2

In “Who Guards the ‘Guardians of the System’? The Role of the Secretariat in WTO Dispute Settlement,” Joost Pauwelyn and Krzysztof Pelc describe, in rich detail, the pervasive involvement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Secretariat in the resolution of trade disputes.1 The authors conclude, rather emphatically, that the Secretariat “exerts more influence over dispute settlement proceedings than the staff of any comparable . . . tribunal.”2 In my view, this conclusion is somewhat misleading, as it portrays the WTO as “exceptional” or “sui generis”3 among international courts. In fact, the invisible army of legal bureaucrats (clerks, registry and secretariat lawyers, arbitral assistants, etc.) plays a “critically important”4 part across the whole field of international adjudication. What is missing is a comparative analysis of the power those bureaucrats wield in different judicial regimes. In this Essay, I outline a basic framework for the comparison, focusing on two main factors: first, the organizational and contractual arrangements that govern the relationship of international judges and bureaucrats; second, the relative distribution of expertise and capital between the two.

In “Who Guards the ‘Guardians of the System’? The Role of the Secretariat in WTO Dispute Settlement,” Joost Pauwelyn and Krzysztof Pelc make a novel and compelling contribution to our understanding of the secretariat of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Firmly grounded in principal-agent theory, their analysis nonetheless resonates with—and thereby suggests some advantages in pursuing—other, complementary approaches that probe the complex inner lives of the secretariats of international organizations. Two central themes in the article, one explicit and the other implicit, provide especially useful entry points for comparison and linkages with these other approaches. In exploring these themes, this Essay aims to build on Pauwelyn and Pelc's insightful work to encourage more critical engagement with the governance dynamics and effects of international secretariats.

This Essay explores whether the African Court of Human and People's Rights’ (African Court) Registry and Legal Division have a similar expansive role in the dispute settlement mechanism as the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Secretariat. The African Court is the African Union's regional body for enforcing human rights. This Essay contributes to the scholarship on African international courts by testing the central arguments in Pauwelyn and Pelc's “Who Guards the ‘Guardians of the System’? The Role of the Secretariat in WTO Dispute Settlement”1 through a comparative analysis of the role of the Secretariat within the African Court.2 Despite the growing jurisprudence and influence of Africa's international courts, they continue to be neglected by mainstream scholarship of international courts and tribunals. This is evident in Pauwelyn and Pelc's article, which does not refer to any of Africa's seven international courts and tribunals. For that matter, the article makes no reference to any international tribunal outside Europe or the United States.3 Our analysis illustrates the fact that the influence of the African Court's Registry and Legal Division (Registry) in the process for dispute settlement is not as significant and concerning as that of the WTO Secretariat. As such, the influence of the Registry on the outcome of a case is significantly limited and does not raise any legitimacy crisis like the WTO. We attribute this disparity to the operational and structural disparities between the African Court and the WTO. In the following paragraphs, we examine each of the factors that Pauwelyn and Pelc raise concerning the influence of the WTO staff in WTO panel and Appellate Body proceedings4 in the context of the functions of the African Court Registry.

In “Who Guards the ‘Guardians of the System’? The Role of the Secretariat in WTO Dispute Settlement,”1 Joost Pauwelyn and Krzysztof Pelc argue that the Secretariat of the World Trade Organization (WTO Secretariat) has more influence over dispute resolution than the staff of any comparable tribunal. This influence is the result of the institutional design of the WTO, but also of unexpected factors that extended the mandate of the WTO Secretariat beyond what was originally conceived. The authors claim that this influence has brought benefits but has also raised questions of legitimacy and accountability. It has also had unintended––and not necessarily positive––legal effects. In this Essay, I offer a comparative view of the Secretariat of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (the IACtHR Secretariat). I first wish to complement Pauwelyn and Pelc's analysis and provide another point of reference to understand the degree of influence that the WTO Secretariat has over dispute resolution. Second, I wish to provide some comparative insights as to the benefits and challenges that come with the existence of a permanent Secretariat playing a pivotal role within international judicial or quasi-judicial systems.

In their article “Who Guards the ‘Guardians of the System’? The Role of the Secretariat in WTO Dispute Settlement,” Joost Pauwelyn and Krzysztof Pelc recharacterize the World Trade Organization's Dispute Settlement System (DSS) as a sui generis administrative review system wherein the “Guardians of the System,” i.e., the Secretariat, no longer merely “assists” panels and the Appellate Body (AB) in their reports, but also exerts influence and control over adjudicators. For them “‘the guardians of the system’ may have contributed to the system's demise by the expansion of their influence.” This Essay attempts to illustrate that Pauwelyn and Pelc's fatalistic view of the DSS is overstated, by providing some comments into the practical functioning of the DSS. We argue that, first, the “guardians of the system” are also restrained by suitable accountability mechanisms in their functions relating to appointment and financial “oversight” of adjudicators. Second, while acknowledging that the Secretariat retains a much stronger institutional memory than adjudicators, we suggest that this asymmetry between the staff and adjudicators’ familiarity with World Trade Organization (WTO) law and policy is not as stark and irredeemable as painted by the authors. Rather, the Secretariat's contribution to consistency and predictability in institutional decisions is ultimately desirable. For governments who established and make use of the WTO dispute system, the balance between ensuring legal coherence and preventing over-judicialization is at the core of the DSS. The participation of diplomats as panelists and the simultaneous creation of an office of Legal Affairs within the Secretariat was intended to ensure consistency in resolution of the members’ disputes to preserve a rules-based system. Finally, we contend that there is a strong internal legitimacy to Secretariat roles.

What are secretariats for in international dispute settlement bodies? The question is implicit in much of what Joost Pauwelyn and Krzysztof Pelc have written in their important article, “Who Guards the ‘Guardians of the System?’ The Role of the Secretariat in WTO Dispute Settlement,” but is one that they do not ask outright.1 Pauwelyn and Pelc thoughtfully describe what the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement secretariat (WTO Secretariat) does as part of their call to determine what the WTO Secretariat is for. Asking what secretariats ought to be for advances the valuable work that has been done on these institutions with an eye to new secretariats that states are now constructing. This Essay makes two points. First, it argues that the work of the WTO Secretariat is typical of many international adjudicatory secretariats, especially those assisting with disputes over matters of international economic law. Seeing those similarities helps us understand how dispute settlement constituencies view the purpose of such secretariats: to carry out the activities highlighted by Pauwelyn and Pelc. Second, the essay picks up where Pauwelyn and Pelc left off and maintains that our collective attention ought to turn to newly envisioned and recently constructed trade dispute secretariats, and their substitutes. The authors provide a platform for examining what experimental designs of secretariats in upcoming trade agreements might look like, and, more important, what we think those secretariats are for.