Transplanting the European Court of Justice to the Andes

Abstract

This chapter explains why national political leaders decided to add a court to their integration project. After considering a variety of options, governments chose to model the Andean Tribunal on the European Union's Court of Justice (ECJ). But they did not slavishly copy the ECJ's design features and legal doctrines. Instead, they selectively adapted those that were appropriate to the more sovereignty-protective Andean context, preserving greater state control over the ATJ and its role in interpreting regional legislation. Thus, this chapter explains why these original adaptations later came to be seen as undermining the effectiveness of the Andean legal system and why, in a 1996 revised treaty, member states revised the institution to bring the ATJ jurisdiction and access rules closer to those of its European predecessor.

Regionalism and diffusion revisited: From final design towards stages of decision-making

“…As this changed due to the EU experience in the 1970s, the absence of supranational dispute settlement systems in other RIOs began to be seen as a problem. 37 When policymakers in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, for example, started discussion of the removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade in the early 1990s, experts quickly pointed to the EU and other RIO's experience in arguing that this undertaking is likely to fail in the absence of more solid institutions to ensure implementation 38 an argument that eventually convinced policymakers. The problem of dispute settlement had diffused to ASEAN from the outside.…”

“…During the 1960s and 1970s few regional integration projects entailed strong dispute settlement mechanisms because no link had been established between dispute settlement and the success of regionalintegration. As this changed due to the EU experience in the 1970s, the absence of supranational dispute settlement systems in other RIOs began to be seen as a problem 36.…”