Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book explores the growing power of international regional courts and the need to balance their independence with proper accountability. While judicial independence is essential for these courts to function legitimately, unchecked judicial power can be equally troubling from a democratic perspective. Therefore, a more nuanced understanding of judicial independence is needed, one that goes beyond shielding judges from external pressures and incorporates mechanisms for accountability and oversight. The argument is structured in three parts. First, it offers a conceptual framework for international judicial independence, sensitive to the unique institutional and political contexts in which regional courts operate. The second part investigates normative grounds for constraints on judicial power. It examines legal accountability mechanisms and then explores how the principle of checks and balances can be adapted to the international sphere. The central claim is that political constraints may well be conceived as forms of institutional interdependence under a refined version of the checks and balances principle. The third part tackles the implications of using checks and balances to justify specific constraints and critically analyses national and regional institutional sources of constraint, as well as two relevant constraining mechanisms: judicial selection and political override. Ultimately, the book proposes a novel normative framework that reconciles judicial independence with the need for legitimate legal and political constraints on judicial power. This contribution fills a significant gap in the existing literature, which remains largely descriptive and insufficiently attentive to the theoretical foundations and normative justification of constraints on regional courts.</jats:p>