Mexico’s effort to hold the gun industry to account has now encountered an institutional setback in San José. Its request for an advisory opinion raised six questions before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR). This post examines, against a more expansive account of OC-30/25 offered here, whether laws granting public or private arms-industry companies procedural immunity against victims’ claims are compatible with Articles 8 and 25 of the American Convention on Human Rights. In its 2025 advisory opinion on illicit firearms trafficking, publicly notified on 5 March 2026, the Court addresses the broader human rights implications of such trafficking, but does not answer that question directly. That omission is central to the opinion. It leaves unresolved whether victims can access a court and obtain a remedy when domestic law bars claims against companies related to the arms industry from the outset. The opinion develops much of the normative framework needed to answer that question, yet stops short of doing so.
The background is instructive. Mexico submitted its request on 11 November 2022 to the IACtHR in the shadow of its federal suit against several major US gun manufacturers, filed in Boston in 2021 and ultimately rejected by the US Supreme Court on 5 June 2025 in Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos. That litigation collided with the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), the 2005 statute that grants broad civil immunity to the gun industry for harms committed with its products. Mexico’s advisory-opinion request was, at least in part, an effort to establish that the Convention imposes duties on states to dismantle precisely those barriers to accountability.
Reformulation as Evasion
The IACtHR begins by invoking its well-established power to reformulate advisory requests. At paragraph 34, it explains that reformulation allows it to proceed “in an abstract and general way” and thus avoid pronouncing on specific facts or controversies. At paragraph 35, it reframes the opinion around a broader question: what are states’ human rights obligations in the face of illicit firearms trafficking?
Presented as jurisdictional discipline, this is also a strategic move. It allows the Court to set out state obligations while leaving untouched the legal mechanism Mexico identified as the engine of impunity. That is especially striking because, in paragraphs 29 to 33, the Court expressly recognises that its advisory function is meant to assist states and OAS organs in interpreting Convention norms, designing public policy, and addressing the substantive object underlying a request, even when related domestic or international proceedings are ongoing. Against that self-description, the decision to recast the case around trafficking in the abstract rather than the compatibility of immunity regimes with the right to a remedy turns reformulation into a vehicle for silence.
The cost is clear. The IACtHR does affirm the duty to guarantee effective judicial remedies for human rights harms arising from illicit firearms trafficking, but it does not address the distinct question of whether procedural immunity laws are compatible with victims’ rights of access to justice and an effective remedy.
What the Court Did Build
That silence should not obscure what OC-30/25 does achieve. On its own terms, the opinion constructs one of the most detailed Inter-American frameworks to date on corporate activity, firearms regulation, and transnational human rights harm.
The IACtHR treats illicit firearms trafficking—and the diversion of weapons from lawful markets into criminal circulation—as a human rights risk that triggers enhanced due diligence obligations under Articles 1(1) and 2 ACHR (paras. 47–52). At paragraph 56, it distills those obligations into four core duties: to regulate, to supervise arms-trading companies, to ensure effective remedies, and to cooperate internationally. The level of operational specificity is notable. The Court endorses marking systems, including for ghost guns (paras. 58–60), tracing mechanisms (paras. 61–62), and export-licensing regimes built around risk assessment and denial where serious violations are foreseeable (paras. 67–68).
At paragraph 76, the Court adds that inadequate controls over state-held or seized weapons may engage international responsibility where diversion is foreseeable. That point is important because it reinforces a broader preventive logic in which failures of control are not exhausted at the moment of omission. Where they enable ongoing and foreseeable harm, responsibility may likewise persist.
The opinion’s most structurally important move, however, lies in its treatment of business and human rights. The Court formally integrates the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights into Inter-American doctrine. That novelty should be stated with some care. The Court is not entering business-and-human-rights terrain for the first time so much as reaffirming and extending that vocabulary to the arms sector, where its application is distinctly new. Still, the opinion goes beyond casual citation. It operationalises the UNGPs in recognisable terms, emphasising that companies are expected to identify, prevent, and remediate human rights impacts across their business relationships (paras. 92–95) and observing that the arms sector has received comparatively little due diligence attention (para. 96).
Just as importantly, the Court gives this framework institutional content. At paragraph 99, it states that oversight of corporate compliance should be entrusted to an authority with sufficient guarantees of independence. And at paragraph 102, it rejects both extremes by making clear that corporations are not responsible for every downstream use of their products, but neither are they beyond scrutiny when their acts or omissions substantially contribute to human rights harm. The standard it sketches is neither strict liability nor impunity. It is a due diligence model with enough texture to matter in future proceedings.
The opinion’s other major innovation lies in its remedial logic. At paragraphs 102 and 108, the Court states that where harms linked to illicit firearms trafficking are established, and the weapons can be traced to an origin state that failed in its prevention duties, that state must ensure access to justice and reparation even where victims are located abroad. That is a significant step. The Court anchors cross-border remedial obligations not in territorial control, but in a traceable chain of preventive failures. The implication is clear even if the Court does not fully elaborate it. Where regulatory failure within one state foreseeably produces human rights harm in another, the matter cannot simply be dismissed as internal.
The Silence on Immunity
And yet the most obvious question remains unanswered. At paragraphs 100 to 102, the Court assembles precisely the vocabulary one would use to challenge a blanket immunity regime, including effectiveness, non-obstruction, judicial independence, and the duty not to block victims’ access to justice where business activity is linked to human rights violations. But the Court never applies those principles to immunity statutes as such.
That omission is significant because the opinion arose from a legal and political landscape in which procedural shields are central. The PLCAA is not merely a technical civil-liability rule. It is a statutory structure designed to insulate an industry from the ordinary consequences of litigation, even where the alleged harms are foreseeable and transnational. In that respect, the Court had before it a clear opportunity to confront a growing international problem involving the use of procedural design to neutralise substantive rights, but it declined to do so. That question was especially important because the regional arms market is not confined to private corporate actors. In Latin America, arms supply has depended on state-owned or semi-state companies, and several states already regulate the production, sale, and transfer of arms. The problem of immunity therefore extends beyond the PLCAA context into the broader accountability framework governing arms production and distribution in the region, as discussed here.
The broader jurisprudential landscape against which the opinion should be read is worth naming. In Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy, ICJ, 2012), the International Court of Justice held that State immunity prevails even where the underlying conduct constitutes a serious violation of peremptory norms, a ruling widely criticised for subordinating substantive accountability to procedural shields. Although the analogy is not exact, the PLCAA operates on a structurally similar logic at the corporate level, insulating an industry from civil liability regardless of the gravity of the foreseeable harm involved. That logic is reinforced by U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., which narrow avenues for transnational civil liability by emphasising territorial and jurisdictional limits.
The result is a deliberate gap. The IACtHR has supplied much of the normative language required to contest arms-industry immunity, but it has left others to make that argument elsewhere. Domestic courts, treaty bodies, and other accountability mechanisms may still draw on OC-30/25 as an interpretive reference, particularly where due diligence failures and barriers to remedy can be framed as independently wrongful. At the same time, the opinion throws into sharper relief the extent to which immunity and remedial obstruction leave populations across the Americas without effective protection or remedy.
OC-30/25 may help frame immunity rules as components of a broader architecture of impunity. But that argument will be made by others, in other fora, with the Court’s own words, used in ways the Court chose not to use them. That is not nothing. But it is less than Mexico asked for, and less than the gravity of the question demanded, since the Court built an advisory opinion it refused to complete.
