Justice in check, but not yet a checkmate

Justice today faces a paradox: it is, at the same time, the last bulwark against arbitrariness and unchecked power, and one of the favorite targets of those who seek to govern without checks and balances. This tension is not unique to any particular country. It is repeated in democracies that are slowly eroding, in regimes that are consolidating their authoritarianism, and also in the international courts that safeguard the global legal order and protect human rights.

Attacks on national and international justice—which are not merely legitimate critiques of its performance or valid discussions about its role within a democratic framework—are not isolated incidents. They are part of a pattern of actions aimed at undermining its independence, reducing its capabilities, and eliminating it as a check on political power. Such actions have emerged progressively and have led to a loss of institutional balance. This impacts the ability of individuals and communities to turn to institutional channels to claim their rights or resolve disputes peacefully; it also affects the conditions under which justice protects the constitutional and international orders. When access to justice is closed off or the mechanism becomes inoperative due to external political pressures, it is not just a system that fails—the basic promise of the rule of law and a rules-based global order fails.

In this edition of the Newsletter, we delve into some of these attacks. We examine what happens when openly autocratic governments—and others with increasingly less concealed authoritarian traits—assault their own judicial institutions. And we also look outward, to international justice, which faces its own assaults, many driven by national governments that have no interest in respecting the legal order to which they once committed.

Read another article from the latest issue of El Sur Global: With judges on the chopping block, who will defend us?

But we also find resistance. In Ecuador and Brazil, judges have upheld the institutional order in the face of pressures seeking to subdue them. In Venezuela, where domestic justice has long ceased to be a real option for the regime’s victims, the International Criminal Court has become more than just a distant tribunal; for many civil society organizations, it is the only hope.

Justice is on the ropes. The blows keep coming, and each one leaves it more exposed. Even so, we are convinced that judges at all levels, with all their limitations, remain indispensable. Not because they are infallible, but because without them, the chances of curbing the concentration of power and calling out arbitrariness are diminished.

But the responsibility does not lie solely with them. If judges have a duty to protect the institutional order and rights, we citizens have a duty to protect the judges, to reject any attempt to undermine their independence, to resist the closure of spaces where calls for justice are raised, and to understand that when a court falls, it does not fall alone.