The first English edition of this book on the American Convention on Human Rights advanced the idea that a second edition would show the Court on its way towards maturity. This is indeed the case; the Court has developed greatly and its case law has been affirmed in many respects. In addition, my idea when I started to work on the case law of the Court was that the egregious violations of human rights seen in the first cases would dwindle to give way to new case law addressing problems of democratic societies. In that prediction, I was wrong. I did not take sufficient account of the delay the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had in processing cases and of the fact that a systematic effort would be made to attempt to clear the significant backlog. From 2004 to 2014 – the period of case law covered in this edition – the Commission has sent a considerable number of cases to the Court concerning facts that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, many of them massacres or disappearances. This means that systematic and gross violations have been a significant part of the Court's work despite the change in political and social circumstances in the region.

This second edition is not merely an update on the jurisprudence. As I mentioned in the first edition, I suspended my writing when I was elected to the Court, as I believed my approach to the analyses of the Convention and the Court's jurisprudence would probably be changed by this experience. The knowledge I acquired in the law of the different States under the jurisdiction of the Court, the many social and cultural problems on the continent, and my experience of the different approaches that were necessary to build a good relationship with the States while at the same time maintaining independence, needed some time to sink in. Only after it had settled in did a review of what I wrote in the first edition seem sensible. I believe I was right about this. Certain subjects began to emerge as being more significant than before and so they had to be explored and developed further. Moreover, there is a further reason why merely updating the first edition would not have been adequate. In this regional system for the protection of human rights, political factors are always present.