The Right to have access to public offices and recent Jurisprudence of the inter-american court of human rights regarding members of justice systems: expanding the scope of protection in defense of democracy?

Abstract

Several cases recently decided by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have expanded the scope of protection of the political right to have access to public office, established in art. 23(1)(c) of the American Convention on Human Rights, which expressly began to include the guarantee of not being arbitrarily dismissed, especially when the guarantees of the Judiciary and the Public Ministry are at stake. The research problem consists of asking how the expansion of the scope of protection of such political right took place. The working hypothesis, confirmed by the results of the research, is that the Inter-American court built this expansion in response to the attacks directed at the democracies in the region. The objective of the research is to demonstrate that, however, this response, alone, tends not to be effective, since these same aggressors of democracy undermine the reaction capacity of these systems and, simultaneously, deny normative force to human rights. The methodology was based on a bibliographic review, having as the most relevant theoretical framework the notion of transconstitutionalism, developed by Marcelo Neves, and the analysis of precedents of the Inter-American system for the protection of human rights.