THE LAW OF MERCOSUR AND INTERNATIONAL LAW - LOOKING FOR AUTONOMY

In almost twenty years of existence as an integration process and fifteen as an international organization of intergovernmental nature, the MERCOSUR has produced an impressive amount of normative instruments The problem is in the inefficacy of most of these instruments, due in great part to the lack of their internalization and application in the territory of the member States or, if that is not the case, to their frequent collision with domestic rules. The efforts carried out in the last years by the organization's very institutions, scholars, national courts and dispute settlement institutions in the sense of recognizing an independent nature to the MERCOSUR norms and granting them a superior hierarchy constitutes the main goal of this paper.