THE EUROPEAN AND LATIN AMERICAN COURTS FOR THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: genesis, characteristics and differences

The formation of a world order after the Second World War brought with it a network of legal norms aimed at the protection of human rights based on the provisions of the Charter of San Francisco and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. From this normative framework emerges the European human rights system which, in its formation, is a model to be followed at the regional level. In this paper, in principle, we describe the European model of human rights protection, which has undergone a fast evolution in the twentieth century to create a rather complex and all-encompassing institution. Then we make a dogmatic description of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The Latin American model, although it also takes the original European model, of a dual control system of the American Convention with an Inter-American Commission and Court, has gone its own way to form a new and original system. In the comparison exercise that we carry out here, we can distinguish the differences between both models, which can be seen as virtues and flaws of each.