Politicization of Constitutional Court of Peru: Effects on Constitutional Review

Abstract

The politicization of the selection process for justices of the Constitutional Court of Peru compromises judicial independence and weakens the legitimacy of constitutional review, which generates distrust in the system of constitutional justice. This study analyzes how such politicization influences decisions about the unconstitutionality, identifies its causal mechanisms, and proposes guidelines for institutional reform. A descriptive-explanatory qualitative approach was employed, based on a systematic documentary analysis of laws, national and inter-American jurisprudence, academic literature, and institutional documents from the 1997–2025 period, complemented by a comparative analysis of the Colombian and Spanish models. Three causal mechanisms were identified: debt of political gratitude, chilling effect in the face of reprisals and the strategic instrumentalization of constitutional review. Furthermore, the arbitrary dismissal of Constitutional Court justices in 1997 was declared by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to have violated Article 8(1) of the American Convention on Human Rights, whose guarantees of non-repetition remain unfulfilled by the Peruvian State. It is concluded that politicization constitutes a structural threat to the rule of law, that demands a comprehensive reform oriented at decentralizing the appointment power, establishing binding technical criteria and strengthening guarantees of Judicial irremovability.