63 b) the alleged victims were sentenced to life imprisonment “once their responsibility for the commission of the crime was established,” in keeping with the ius puniendi of the State. The Peruvian State had every right to prosecute those people for the crime they committed and to try them in accordance with the procedures established in its domestic laws. They could not be prosecuted for another crime, such as terrorism for example, since the acts they committed fell within the scope of Decree Law 25,659. The State would have been at fault had they been brought to trial charged with another crime; c) the final ruling in that case became res judicata; d) the criminal activities in which the alleged victims engaged “inflicted serious material damage and caused the loss of precious human lives, forcing the State to adopt exceptional measures to deal with them.” It is ironic that the State is being asked to compensate “the authors of abominable crimes of lese humanité, and even order their release; the precedent this would set would seriously imperil the stability of democratic governments struggling to combat subversive violence”; e) to claim procedural irregularities “is a breach of the sovereignty of Peru’s domestic jurisdiction, perverts inter-American due process, and takes the side of those who would ignore the fact that domestic courts are in a better position to judge the facts and the law that applies to a particular case,” an assertion premised on the notion that international human rights protection is merely for the purpose of collaborating in or supplementing that protection; f) the Inter-American Court is not a tribunal that declares individuals innocent and does not have the right to order that criminals be released. The responsibility of the Inter-American Court […] is to judge the acts of a State […]. Given these facts, we are petitioning the Court to indicate what our responsibilities are […] as a State grappling with a particular set of social factors, as the law is not impervious to such factors. Clearly, acts of terrorism are an attack upon society; and g) the request that the Court order [their] immediate release was “immaterial to the issue before the Court and previously before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights” and was “not recommended in Confidential Report No. 17/97.” There is an inconsistency between ordering a juridical act vacated, nullified, or expunged, which is tantamount to saying that “the juridical act never existed”, and retrying the defendant “since one cannot be retried for the same facts.” 217. As for the Commission’s express request that the proceeding be nullified, the Court believes that certain observations are in order regarding the properties that every legal proceeding should have, the circumstances in the instant case and their consequences.