Constitution, neither the President nor the Vice President of the Republic can in any way intervene in an impeachment process; the articles of impeachment are prepared by the House of Representatives, and the impeachment trial is conducted by the Senate. 12. According to the petitioner, in the wake of this agreement, the political parties and the President had allegedly designated the Vice President, Luis Alberto Castiglioni, to serve as mediator and ask the justices of the Supreme Court to tender their respective resignations; if not the impeachment process would begin immediately. Confronted with this decision –one widely reported in the newspaper articles that are part of the Commission’s file on this case-, the Supreme Court en banc adopted a decision containing a public statement in which the justices declared that they would neither relinquish their right nor forswear their duty and obligation to continue administering justice. According to the petitioner, it was this declaration that allegedly triggered the process of impeaching the six justices on the Supreme Court.1 13. The petitioner adds that on September 6, 2003, the President of the Republic publicly stated that he would “pulverize the judicial branch.” His statement was reported by various media outlets, whose articles are part of this complaint. Thereafter, the petitioner states, the senators and political leaders allegedly began to look for grounds to impeach those justices that they had already decided to remove from the bench. To that end, a letter box was established for collecting complaints against the justices on the Court. When no complaints were forthcoming, the petitioner alleges that they scoured through the Supreme Court rulings to put together the 20-point articles of impeachment as the basis for the decision to remove the justices from their seats on the bench and replace them with figures representing the parties in power. 14. The petitioner explains that there was no impeachment law setting out the rules of procedure for the impeachment process provided for in Article 225 of the Paraguayan Constitution. Therefore, on November 25, 2003 the Senate passed Resolution No. 122 entered into the Commission’s file on this case- in which it established a set of rules for an impeachment trial. The petitioner contends that those rules prohibit the exercise of any means of defense, appeal of the decisions adopted by the Senate, and recusal of the judges, who are the senators. That resolution further stipulates that the defense argument may last no more than three hours. 15. On November 27th 2003, the petitioner filed an action challenging the constitutionality of this resolution. According to the petitioner, his challenge was never decided because the Constitutional Court to rule on this action has not yet been established. He explained that the principal and alternate members of the Constitutional Court who should have heard the complaint recused themselves. This, the petitioner argues, constituted a violation of Article 25 of the Convention, which establishes the right to judicial protection. 16. The petitioner observes that the articles of impeachment were signed by the party leaders in the House of Representatives and listed twenty counts. The petitioner himself was indicted on sixteen counts. The petitioner contends that the twenty articles of impeachment were the subject of spirited debate in the House of Representatives, leaving no time for the Committee on Constitutional Affairs to analyze them. That Committee’s role is to determine whether the conditions have been met to institute an impeachment 1 Justices Raúl Sapena Brugada, Jerónimo Irala Burgos, Felipe Santiago Paredes, Carlos Fernández Gadea, Luis Lezcano Claude and Bonifacio Ríos Ávalos.