In 2024, Guatemala asked the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to issue an advisory opinion on whether democracy should be recognized as an autonomous human right. The Court has now entered a decisive phase in its consideration: it held public hearings in March and will now deliberate before issuing its advisory opinion.
If the hearings are any indication, the Court is skeptical of framing democracy as a human right. Such doubt echoes public commentary on the proceedings. The judges broadly agreed that democracy matters in the Inter-American system. At issue in the hearings was whether the Court can effectively define and protect democracy as an independent right without overstepping its judicial role and what practical value such recognition would add.
This skepticism is unfounded. An autonomous right to democracy is already embedded in the Inter-American system, and the time has come for the Court to say so plainly. The system now urgently needs it.
The added value of an autonomous right to democracy
Throughout the hearings, the Court repeatedly returned to a central question: what would a proposed right to democracy add to the human rights framework not already provided by existing rights? A similar fear of the right’s redundancy has surfaced online, the latest manifestation of a long-running debate over human rights “inflation.”
The region’s main human rights instrument, the American Convention on Human Rights, protects more than twenty civil and political rights, ranging from the right to life and humane treatment to freedom of expression, assembly, and political participation. This scope has allowed the Convention to respond to discrete anti-democratic abuses, including electoral exclusion, political disqualification, and the removal of elected officials.
Yet the Convention has proved ill-equipped to confront democracy’s slow collapse in places like Venezuela and Nicaragua, where the breakdown unfolded gradually and was not triggered by a single, easily identifiable violation.
The Convention’s framework does not treat democracy itself as an independently protected legal interest, and the law offers no clear standard for when its erosion becomes a violation. This lacuna enables autocrats to dismantle democratic life piece by piece until it is too late to reverse course.
An autonomous right to democracy closes that gap. Recognizing democracy as an autonomous right would allow the Court to respond to democratic collapse as a legal wrong in its own right rather than only addressing it piecemeal through findings under other provisions.
The basis and meaning of a right to democracy
During the hearings, the judges also questioned whether there is any legal basis for a right to democracy, and if so, what the scope of that right would be. After all, the Convention does not expressly recognize a distinct right to democracy, much less define democracy or what would constitute its violation. As some commentators argue, this absence challenges whether such a right exists in current international law at all.
But the reality is that this right has long existed in the Inter-American system, embedded in its legal framework and the Convention itself. Since at least the 1990s, regional practice—treaties, Organization of American States resolutions, and collective responses to democratic breakdowns—has gradually provided democracy with a clearer meaning and protections as a legal value.
Central to this process was the adoption of the Inter-American Democratic Charter (IDC) in 2001. The IDC explicitly recognizes that peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and that governments must promote and defend it. It also defined the meaning of democracy and set its core elements in broad, non-exhaustive terms. The IDC describes democracy as a representative and participatory system grounded in the rule of law, institutional accountability, and the effective political participation of the peoples of the Americas.
But above all, the IDC helps to clarify the Convention’s meaning. The Convention requires its own interpretation within the broader Inter-American legal order. This provision brings other Inter-American human rights instruments and the rights and guarantees inherent in representative democracy, including those reflected in the IDC, under the larger umbrella of the rights enshrined in the Convention.
Read alongside the IDC’s requirements, the Convention’s guarantees of due process, freedom of expression, association, assembly, and political participation do more than protect isolated freedoms. Although the Convention does not expressly enumerate a right to democracy, those guarantees protect the essential institutional conditions of democratic governance—and thus the substance of the right to democracy is already embedded in the Convention’s normative structure. The Court reflected this view in a 2011 decision that treated protests against the 2009 Honduran coup d’état and participation in public debate as expressions of a broader entitlement to democracy itself.
This approach is fully consistent with the Court’s rulings on rights not expressly named in the Convention. For example, the Court has repeatedly held that the right to truth, the right to identity, and the right to defend human rights emerge through a systematic interpretation of guarantees already protected by the Convention.
The cost of silence
The Court’s advisory proceedings come at a time when democracy urgently needs legal protection. Across the Americas, democratic institutions are under sustained pressure, and democracy monitors warn of a broader decline in democratic governance globally. Autocrats like Daniel Ortega have pushed the dangerous idea that democracy can be taken from the people as a mere matter of policy.
Silence in the face of that claim carries a grave cost. If democracy is to be protected, the Court must say so clearly before it is too late. People have a right to live under a democratic order, and no one has the power to take that right away.