The reconfiguration of the relationship between international and national law has played an important role in shaping transformative constitutionalism in Latin America. This chapter introduces a new concept—inter-Americanization—to explain that transformation. The inter-Americanization of national legal orders describes the gradual adoption of inter-American standards by states that have recognized the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and their incorporation into national public law. We reconstruct the national and inter-American norms as well as the legal discourses that drive this process forward. Moreover, we exemplify the process of inter-Americanization with salient decisions of IACtHR, with a special focus on guarantees of nonrepetition. Our main argument is that such a process was enabled by a regulated open state, which allowed other legal orders to penetrate into national constitutions. We conclude by emphasizing that inter-Americanization has contributed to finding answers to the structural challenges of the Latin American region.
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