On May 26 and 27 of 2014 in Port of Prince, Haiti the 4th Conference of States Parties to the American Convention on Human Rights will take place, organized by Ecuador and Uruguay and hosted by Haiti. Based on the information available about this conference it appears that, unlike past conferences, this time there will be a discussion session between States Parties and not Parties to the Convention and civil society organizations will be present. As for the participation of civil society, we are less than a week out from the conference and there is still no information on which civil society organizations will be invited or what criteria is being used to determine who gets invited. Additionally, it has been impossible to have access to the official agenda for the meeting, and it is still unclear if the discussions will be led by the host country (Haiti), by the organizing States (Ecuador and Uruguay) or other participating States.

Such a vacuum of information and the continued de facto exclusion of the hemisphere’s civil society compromises the substance of the discussions at these Conferences and invites speculation on if the real purpose of these forums is to improve the function of the IAHRS or to offer some States a platform from which to continue the same critiques of the IACHR that they espoused during the reform process that took place from 2011 to 2013.

In the latest edition of the magazine AportesDPLF, dedicated to The Reform of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, we have included an article on the Conference of States Parties to the American Convention: Form over Substance that addresses these issues.