Freedom Cannot Survive Without an Independent Judiciary

In democracies, unlike dictatorships or autocracies, a leader’s power is checked by counterbalancing forces and institutions. Elections are a form of “vertical accountability,” because they require officeholders to answer directly to citizens for their actions. Vertical accountability is also provided by other important features of a democracy, including a robust civil society, independent media, and the private sector.

By contrast, “horizontal accountability” arises from the dispersal of powers among different institutions within the government itself. Whereas vertical accountability gives the governed a say in who governs them, horizontal accountability ensures that no one person or institution can gain absolute power, even after winning an election. The founders of the United States recognized such a separation of authorities as “essential to the preservation of liberty,” arguing in the Federalist Papers that the leaders of each branch of government must have “the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.”

Every democracy has its own configuration of checks and balances. Some empower unicameral or bicameral legislatures, distribute authority to autonomous states and provinces, or assign special oversight duties to independent agencies. But all democracies rely on an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and protect individual liberty.

Freedom in the World 2025, Freedom House’s latest annual report on political rights and civil liberties around the globe, found that elected leaders who seek to undermine such constraints on their power are driving serious deterioration in democracies. The courts in particular have emerged as a target, as presidents and prime ministers from Mexico to Israel have sought to diminish the independence of the judiciary using three main tactics: taking control of judicial appointments, influencing how judges are professionally disciplined and even removed, and limiting the scope of judges’ authority to review laws and policies.

These tactics, and others like the simple reduction of funding for the legal system, weaken the courts as an effective check on elected officials. Researchers using comparative data have argued that attacks on the independence of the judiciary become more likely when other sources of horizontal accountability—like the legislature or independent oversight agencies—are undermined, and that erosion of judicial autonomy can eventually lead to the collapse of the separation of powers and the emergence of authoritarian rule, in which power is both concentrated and unaccountable.

The dangers of government with politically controlled courts

The cases of El Salvador and Turkey—two countries that have experienced steep declines in their scores in Freedom in the World over the last decade, leaving them with Partly Free and Not Free status, respectively—provide sobering examples of what can happen once elected leaders are no longer constrained by independent courts.

In El Salvador, which had already experienced some backsliding under previous governments, President Nayib Bukele’s road to the consolidation of presidential power began with an attack on the courts. Early in his first term, after the Supreme Court limited the government’s ability to arbitrarily detain individuals for violating its draconian, pandemic-related restrictions on movement, Bukele said he would not abide by the judgment and urged the security forces to ignore the court. After his party won a supermajority in the national legislature in 2021, Bukele dismissed all the members of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court as well as the attorney general, forcing the dismissals through despite the Constitutional Chamber’s finding that they were unconstitutional. The government also amended a law on employment conditions for the judiciary, which helped the president to push out and replace hundreds of judges who had shown signs of independence. A newly quiescent judiciary appointed by this government then permitted Bukele to stand for reelection in 2024, setting aside a constitutional prohibition on consecutive presidential terms.

Thanks to his control of the executive and legislature, Bukele has since been able to fast-track constitutional changes, altering the way that the constitution could be amended in the future and eliminating the need for public consultation or judicial review. This empowered the legislature to extend presidential terms from five years to six and allow indefinite reelection, among other amendments. Moreover, without effective oversight from the courts, the government has been able to renew a “state of exception,” which suspends due process guarantees and basic rights like freedom of assembly, every month since March 2022. Using these emergency powers, authorities have detained more than 80,000 people in conditions that have raised serious human rights concerns.

In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have replaced thousands of judges and prosecutors with progovernment loyalists since consolidating power in the wake of a 2016 coup attempt. Legal changes in 2018 transferred responsibility for appointing Turkey’s Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSK), which oversees judicial appointments and disciplinary measures, from the judiciary itself to the president and parliament. As a result, judges now frequently toe the government line in their rulings, and those who do not may be replaced.

Erdoğan has leveraged the politically captured justice system to punish his critics, including independent media outlets, political opponents, and outspoken civic activists. Scores of journalists have been detained and sentenced to prison for critical reporting on the government and other sensitive issues. In March of this year, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, the most popular opposition politician in the country, was arrested on corruption charges just days before his Republican People’s Party (CHP) was set to name him as its presidential candidate. Despite nationwide protests that were triggered by the arrest, İmamoğlu remains in pretrial detention and is now the subject of an espionage investigation.

These cautionary tales may seem distant or improbable to observers in established democracies, but it is important to note that even countries with a rating of Free in Freedom in the World can experience serious attacks on judicial independence. The damage done to the courts under the Law and Justice (PiS) party in Poland, for instance, has proven difficult to address since the group lost power in 2023 after eight years in office. When PiS won the 2015 parliamentary elections, it refused to accept several justices who had been appointed to the Constitutional Tribunal by the outgoing legislature, and instead filled the vacancies with its own progovernment picks. In the years that followed, PiS enacted a series of sweeping judicial reforms that undermined the courts’ ability to serve as a check on executive and legislative power, and judges who ruled against the governing majority risked being suspended or transferred. Although a new political coalition defeated PiS at the polls in 2023, it has struggled to untangle the constitutional mess left by PiS’s irregular transformation of the judicial system.

Tensions between the judiciary and the executive in the United States

The United States, like other long-standing democracies, remains a free, resilient, and pluralistic nation. Its constitutional structure as a federal republic, with a strong prescribed separation of powers and a bicameral legislature, provides a durable framework for democratic governance and a unique system of checks and balances that is markedly different from that of El Salvador or Turkey.

However, recurring tensions between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in the United States have become more acute in recent years. One contentious issue has been the de facto expansion of unilateral decision-making power available to the president, including through the use of executive orders and memorandums, across presidential administrations during the last two decades or more.

The pace and scope of executive actions taken by President Donald Trump since he returned to office in January 2025 have intensified this ongoing national debate about the appropriate limits of executive authority. While the administration and its supporters argue that decisive executive action is necessary to respond to urgent policy problems, many scholars contend that recent measures have violated constitutional and statutory law, creating a new level of friction between the executive branch and the judiciary. As an unusually large number of lawsuits challenging executive initiatives advance through the courts, rulings about the proper boundaries of executive authority have become increasingly sensitive.

Against this backdrop, administration officials have questioned the motives of federal judges and called for those who rule against the government to be impeached. Whistleblower complaints have alleged that a senior member of the Department of Justice directed his subordinates to ignore the courts. In an unusual step, the government recently filed suit against a state’s full roster of federal judges after they issued stays in immigration cases—stays that the judges described as necessary to ensure due process. Although these confrontations and related rhetorical attacks are concerning, the administration has to date complied with final judicial rulings, and several of its initiatives, including reductions in the federal workforce, dismissals of independent commissioners, and immigration enforcement operations, have been allowed to proceed as judicial review continues.

Mutual respect between the executive and the judiciary has been a core feature of American governance since the early 19th century. Presidents from both major parties—including President Trump—have adjusted policies to align with Supreme Court decisions. Courts, in turn, have presumed that the government is acting in good faith, generally crediting the executive branch’s factual assertions about its own processes and decision making in court filings. Recently, however, several judges have raised concerns about the accuracy of certain government representations and questioned whether their orders are being implemented fully. The erosion of trust between branches has been troubling to observers across the political spectrum, as has the firing or sidelining of long-serving, nonpartisan career officials whose expertise typically informs and supports the government’s legal positions. The loss of such officials could exacerbate breakdowns in executive-judicial communication and understanding.

Defending the courts

Around the world, a growing number of democratic and nondemocratic governments alike have attempted to influence or weaken the judiciary—whether through political pressure, threats, stacked appointments of loyalists, deliberately prolonged vacancies, or disregard for court decisions. When the independence of the judiciary erodes, essential checks on government power can be weakened or lost, exposing citizens to abuses of authority. The framers of the US Constitution warned explicitly that “liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary alone, but would have every thing to fear from its union with either of the other departments.”

Preserving a strong and impartial judicial system requires vigilance and concerted effort by public officials, the media, legal professionals, and civic institutions. Effective strategies include clear public communication about the constitutional function of the courts and the importance of their independence, swift and serious responses to personal attacks on judges, and legislation aimed at enhancing the safety and security of judicial officers. Voters can also play a crucial role by supporting fairness and impartiality in judicial appointments—whether through ballot measures or through the election of legislators responsible for the confirmation of new judges.

For democracy to thrive in the United States and around the world, every individual and institution must fulfill their responsibilities and guard against government overreach. And all who wield public authority must remain accountable to the people they serve. The continued health of any democracy depends on the steady, cross-partisan commitment of citizens and officials to these shared principles.