Unpacking the Partnership: Typology of Constitutional Courts’ Roles in Implementation of the European Court of Human Rights’ Case Law

Constitutional courts are regularly depicted as the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECtHR) partners which contribute significantly to domestic implementation of the ECtHR’s case law. This article acknowledges the constitutional courts’ importance in the implementation of ECHR rights, however, it argues that the domestic implementation environment is more complex and asks for a more nuanced approach to assessing the role of constitutional courts in implementing the ECtHR case law. The article offers a typology of constitutional courts’ roles in mechanisms of implementation of the ECtHR’s case law. The typology aims to provide a more nuanced picture of constitutional court’s roles as it takes into account their interactions with other domestic actors during different stages of implementation, and their different postures towards the ECtHR’s judgments. Informed by the typology, the article revisits the debate about the significance of constitutional courts in the ECHR system

States Of Discontent

Latin America’s recent inclusionary turn centers on changing relationships between the popular sectors and the state. Yet the new inclusion unfolds in a region in which most states are weak and prone to severe pathologies, such as corruption, inefficiency, and particularism. The first part of the chapter outlines an argument, developed at more length elsewhere, regarding how “state crises” helped drive the consolidation of three distinct party system trajectories among the eight South American countries where the Left would eventually win power. The second part of the chapter argues that these trajectories differed in three ways that likely conditioned how the concomitant inclusionary Left turn unfolded in each case: the institutionalization of left-wing parties, the occurrence of state transformation via constitutional reform, and the level of state capacity. The discussion helps highlight the central role of the state and its pathologies in both driving alternative paths of political development and in conditioning the politics of inclusion. By putting the emphasis on the state and its pathologies, we can better consider not just the sources of sociopolitical exclusion but also the limits of sociopolitical inclusion