The cross references between the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-american Court of Human Hights

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the mutual references made in their judgments by the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-american Court of Human Rights.
Previous studies on circulation of foreign precedents have been showing that the use of foreign or «extra-systemic» precedents is not a phenomenon limited to national courts, but does also affect international courts. Nontheless, the notion of «judicial dialogue» is often abused, and the interactions between courts are hardly proved through empirical data but rather through seldom examples.
The article presents the results of a general and systemic research on the case-law of the two courts in the period between 1987 and 2012, to verify if there is some kind of «judicial dialogue» or «cross-fertilization» between the two systems. The research follows the methodology previously applied in empirical studies on the use of foreign precedents by constitutional courts, which consists of both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis.
The research did not show any evidence of the existence of a real «dialogue» between the two courts, but rather of a «convergence» among their jurisprudence in several fields.