ARTICLE: Quiet Force in Raucous Arena: International Court’s Rulings Aid Democracy in Latin America,” by Bob Davis, Wall Street Journal, 23 January 2006, p. A15.

The Organization of American States has a 7-member panel of commissioners that does for Latin America (and rarely, for America itself) what the International Criminal Court basically tries to do for the Gap: provide a court of last resort when the local states’ legal systems don’t function up to par.

This international court goes by the name of Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and it’s been used plenty of times by individuals in Latin American states to bring political abuses by previous autocratic regimes into the light of day, thus facilitating national reconciliation processes and the movement toward democracy.

Naturally, with the behemoth U.S. always on the panel, it tends to offer only the casual advice to its host (the court sits in DC) on its own human rights abuses (like Guantanamo), but whereas the U.S. itself tends to ignore such non-compulsory rulings, they are taken quite seriously in Latin America, in part, as the article says, to avoid bad publicity and in part because the governments in question really want to change.

Isn’t it amazing that this court can work so well and yet we fear the ICC so much? And this fear exists despite our bilateral exclusionary immunity treaties with basically every state in the Gap, ones in which Gap states agree to basically never “sue” the U.S. for the actions of its military there.

Makes you wonder how much good the ICC could really do for the Gap if we supported it more.