by the President in the Order requiring them,28 and the purpose of this case, and they will be assessed in the corresponding chapter together with the other elements of the body of evidence. In accordance with the Court’s case law, the statements made by the presumed victims cannot be assessed separately, but rather within the entire body of evidence of the proceedings, because they are useful to the extent that they can provide more information about the alleged violations and their consequences.29 41. With their final written arguments, the representatives submitted in writing an expanded version of the expert opinion of Maria Sol Yáñez de la Cruz, which had been requested by the Court during the public hearing (supra para. 13). In this regard, the State and the Commission had the opportunity to present their observations on this document; however, they made no observations in this regard. Considering it useful for deciding this case, the Court incorporates it also, in accordance with Article 58 of the Rules of Procedure, and it will be assessed as pertinent, taking into account the body of evidence and the rules of sound judicial discretion. VI PRIOR CONSIDERATIONS A. Determination of the presumed victims 42. In its brief submitting the case, the Commission indicated that, in keeping with Article 35 of the Court’s Rules of Procedure, it was attaching report on merits 177/10 which included three annexes on the presumed victims that it had been able to identify up until the approval of the said report, namely: (i) the victims of extrajudicial executions; (ii) the survivors and the next of kin of the executed victims, and (iii) the forcibly displaced victims. According to the Commission, in report on merits 177/10, it explained the difficulties it had faced to identify the presumed victims in this case and described the criteria used to identify them, in order not to exclude from this status a priori any person said to have died in the massacres or to be surviving next of kin, “taking into account the exceptional characteristics of this case.” Nevertheless, it clarified that “much of the data on name, age, gender or family ties is approximate and imprecise” and that, in this case, it had adopted “flexible criteria for the identification of the victims,” in the understanding that, as indicated in one of recommendations of the merits report, “the State of El Salvador must make the full identification of the executed victims […], as well as of the next of kin of the victims executed, within the framework of the investigation it is required to conduct.” 43. Specifically, in the merits report, the Commission observed that, in this case, several complex circumstances existed concurrently that entailed serious difficulties for the identification of the presumed victims, both those who had died and their surviving next of kin. The Commission explained that, regarding the victims who had lost their life in the massacres, it had based itself on the list from the Report of the Oficina de Tutela Legal del Arzobispado published in 1992, and on the list provided by the petitioners on September 24, 2010. With regard to the surviving next of kin, it indicated it had the names of: (i) those who had testified before the Second First Instance Court of San Francisco Gotera during the judicial proceeding; (ii) some people who had testified before the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) and other authorities in the context of the investigations prior to the exhumations of 1992, 2000, 2001 and 2003, and (iii) the partial list of 154 people provided by the petitioners in a communication of September 24, 2010. However, the Commission observed that the number of people who died in the massacres and the surviving next of kin “may exceed the number of people identified to date.” It considered that, owing to the scale and nature of the violations that occurred in this case, those people added by the representatives should also be considered victims. According to 28 The purpose of all these statements was established in the Order of the President of the Court of March 22, 2012, first and fifth operative paragraphs, which can be consulted on the Court’s web page at: http://www.corteidh.or.cr/docs/asuntos/elmozote_%2022_03_12.pdf 29 Cf. Case of Loayza Tamayo v. Peru. Merits. Judgment of September 17, 1997. Series C No. 33, para. 43, and Case of the Río Negro Massacres v. Guatemala, para. 43. 15