Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos: The judicialization of politics

Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos is Professor of Comparative & Judicial Politics and a Fellow of Nuffield College. He first came to prominence with his book entitled The Politics of Transitional Justice in Latin America: Power, Norms and Capability Building (2020) in which he showed how judges in Mexico, Peru Chile and Argentina came to be influenced both by civil society expertise in the field of human rights and also by international human rights law. The book won prizes from the American Political Science Association, the International Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association. Since then he has published a stream of work and is very much a rising star both in the field of Latin American politics and in political science more broadly. Our conversation is about the judicialization of politics, or the politicization of the judiciary, a subject which has drawn increasing attention in Latin America as judges have found themselves called upon to adjudicate incases involving corruption and human rights–topics which politicians and soldiers used to keep out of the reach of the courts, but which now are often held to be judiciable by prosecutors or judges. Also, politicians themselves often take their disputes to the courts. As you will discover, once judges are called upon to rule on these issues they get drawn into turbulent waters and to some extent they have to deploy the same tools as politicians in order to protect their independence and their reputations.