International Law and Constitution-Making in Chile: Opportunities and Limits

International law impacts constitution-making processes: international agencies act as advisors or observers in constitutional replacement mechanisms, along with the global dialogue between international law and domestic law, whereby constitutions expressly incorporate international law (especially, on human rights), enact norms with international law in mind, or straightforwardly constitutionalize international human rights treaties. This Article explores the impact of international law on the constituent process in Chile, which took a different and untrodden path, by expressly establishing a duty to ensure that the future constitutional text “respect...the international treaties ratified by Chile and currently in force.” Although such duty was political rather than legal in nature, international law—in particular, human rights law—played a key role in the work of the first Constitutional Convention. While the literature often depicts international human rights law as being “the floor not the roof,” Chile’s constituent process shows that international human rights law can also operate as a limit to constitutional innovations.