States of emergency, courts, and global norms in Latin America

Regimes of exception 1 are an old foe of human rights in Latin America. These constitutional clauses have become infamous for facilitating military intervention and restricting the enjoyment of civil and political rights in “emergency” situations to deal with social unrest, ever since the 19th century (Loveman, 1993). In fact, the “regime of exception” mechanism itself is an example of how the globalization of law has the potential to be a double-edged sword; the mechanism was imported from European constitutional models by Latin American legislators during the 19th century (Aguilar Rivera, 1996; FixZamudio, 2004). The specifi c question we pose in this chapter is: How have constitutional courts been able to protect human rights during regimes of exception in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru? And how have global treaty norms been used by national judiciaries to shift globalized repressive legal practices?