Mar 30.─ Time was when the left in Latin America believed in human rights and welcomed outside pressure to secure them. Now that they are in power, the region's far-left populists bridle at any criticism, domestic or foreign, of their self-proclaimed revolutions. Led by Ecuador's Rafael Correa, these governments have been campaigning to castrate the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and its associated court, bodies that operate under the aegis of the Organisation of American States (OAS). At an extraordinary meeting of the OAS general assembly on March 22nd they failed, at least for the time being.
Ecuador, backed by Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela, wanted to curb the autonomy of the commission and the OAS's rapporteur on freedom of expression and bar them from receiving outside donations.
Since both depend in part on European donations, that risked crippling them. Instead, the assembly approved a set of reforms agreed on by the IACHR aimed at ensuring that it retains the consent of the region's democratic governments.
Human-rights groups credit the IACHR with helping to ensure that abuses of power by military dictatorships of the 1970s are punished, and that soldiers charged with crimes should face civilian courts. More recently, the commission has been critical of assaults on media freedom by Mr Correa and by Venezuela's government.
But the commission was also thought to have overreached itself when in 2011 it issued a precautionary measure (ie, injunction) ordering Brazil immediately to halt construction of a large dam at Belo Monte in the Amazon ...
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