TIME was when the left in Latin America believed in human rights and welcomed outside pressure to secure them. Now that they are in power, the region’s far-left populists bridle at any criticism, domestic or foreign, of their self-proclaimed revolutions. Led by Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, these governments have been campaigning to castrate the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and its associated court, bodies that operate under the aegis of the Organisation of American States (OAS). At an extraordinary meeting of the OAS general assembly on March 22nd they failed, at least for the time being.

Ecuador, backed by Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela, wanted to curb the autonomy of the commission and the OAS’s rapporteur on freedom of expression and bar them from receiving outside donations. Since both depend in part on European donations, that risked crippling them. Instead, the assembly approved a set of reforms agreed on by the IACHR aimed at ensuring that it retains the consent of the region’s democratic governments.

Human-rights groups credit the IACHR with helping to ensure that abuses of power by military dictatorships of the 1970s are punished, and that soldiers charged with crimes should face civilian courts. More recently, the commission has been critical of assaults on media freedom by Mr Correa and by Venezuela’s government.

But the commission was also thought to have overreached itself when in 2011 it issued a precautionary measure (ie, injunction) ordering Brazil immediately to halt construction of a large dam at Belo Monte in the Amazon. That decision was beyond the commission’s powers, according to Diego García Sayan, the president of the Inter-American court. It prompted Brazil to suspend its financing of the OAS.

The row over Belo Monte triggered a consultation over reforming the way the IACHR works. In the event, this has involved fairly minor changes. The commission has specified that it will only issue precautionary measures where there is a serious and imminent threat of irreparable damage to human rights. Its annual report will include a general survey of rights in the region, rather than a kind of blacklist. These reforms “changed the climate” and satisfied “90% of countries” including Brazil, according to José Miguel Insulza, the OAS’s secretary-general.

Those human-rights groups who argued that the reform process would mutilate the commission were wrong, says Mr García Sayan. Nevertheless, the battle may not be over. In a sop to Ecuador and its friends, the assembly also agreed “to continue the dialogue” on the commission. The IACHR, by its reform and lobbying, “headed off the worst outcome, but that shouldn’t be confused with a resounding victory and an endorsement of the commission,” says Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington, DC. “There are governments that are intent on attrition, on doing everything they can to weaken the system”.