INTRODUCTION

• 1. The existence of human rights enshrined in the American Convention, constituting a minimum standard that State Parties must respect and ensure, requires the establishment of mechanisms for the supervision and protection of those rights. It is primarily the State that must establish effective domestic remedies for protecting rights, without prejudice to the existence of complementary international supervisory mechanisms. Human rights are to be enjoyed and respected at all times and in all places, and if they are violated there must be a rapid response to re-establish their protection. This response can only come from the corresponding State, given that international monitoring is by design called to act when the domestic jurisdiction does not fulfill its primary duty to offer the proper and effective remedies to a violation. All this is, in principle, reflected in Article 8, which states that “[e]very person has the right to a hearing.” The European Convention sets forth in Article 6 that “everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing.” The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states in Article 14 that “everyone shall be entitled to a fair and public hearing.” The European Court and the Human Rights Committee that supervises compliance with the ICCPR derive from these provisions all that is needed in order to ensure the judicial protection of human rights at the domestic level. In Latin America, however, the drafters of the Convention wished to add a specific remedy called the right to amparo. This endeavor, nevertheless, ended up in a right worded in a confusing way, which opened up uncertainties of interpretation. The importance of this remedy – the amparo – has been recognized by the Inter-American Court, which has found that Article 25 “is one of the fundamental pillars not only of the American Convention, but of the very rule of law in a democratic society in the terms of the Convention.”

• 2. The writ of amparo has its origins in Latin America. It was born with the Mexican Constitution of 1857 and from there spread to other countries in the region from early on.