responsibility of a State that has agreed to be bound by that Convention and has also accepted the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In this understanding, the Court has already had occasion to apply the Convention against Torture and to assess the responsibility of various States in more than 40 contentious cases in which it was alleged that the Convention had been violated. 25 Given that Brazil is a party to the Convention against Torture and has accepted this Court’s contentious jurisdiction, the Court has competence ratione materiae to rule on the alleged responsibility of the State for violating that instrument in this case. Therefore, the Court rejects the preliminary objection of lack of competence filed by the State. C. Failure to exhaust domestic remedies to obtain reparations C.1. Arguments of the State, observations of the Commission and of the representatives 39. The State argued that the first requirement for the admissibility of a petition before the inter-American human rights system was the exhaustion of domestic remedies, because the victim may not resort to the protection of the international jurisdiction without, first, having recourse to a domestic remedy that permits the recognition of the violation and its reparation. It asserted that when the victim has only exhausted the domestic remedies to request a declaration of the violation of the right to life of a person murdered by the State, he cannot then resort to the international jurisdiction to request reparation for this violation, because the State could not be caught unaware by a request for pecuniary reparation that it had been unable to examine in the domestic sphere. 40. The State also indicated that, in this case, domestic remedies were available to declare the violations that had been alleged and to obtain the corresponding reparations, and the presumed victims had not exhausted them. It asserted that it had not paid any financial compensation other than that established through the administrative channels, because the presumed victims had not requested compensation before the domestic jurisdiction despite the existence of the appropriate judicial mechanisms to present this claim. 41. Similarly, the State argued that the representatives had justified the failure to exhaust domestic remedies by citing Article 46(2)(b) of the Convention. However, it indicated that although this bore a substantial relationship to the merits of the matter, it could not, of itself, justify the failure to exhaust the domestic jurisdiction. 42. In its answering brief, the State transcribed several rulings of domestic courts in which the State was sentenced to compensate the damage caused by detentions and acts of torture during the military dictatorship, and indicated that the Superior Court of Justice had declared that actions for compensation for facts similar to those of the instant case were not subject to a statute of limitations. Consequently, the State concluded that there was a very favorable environment for granting compensation in this case. It added that, in this case, the victims had received compensation of R$100,000.00 (an amount that, at the time, was equivalent to approximately US$100,000.00) and this showed that the State had tried to comply with its obligation to redress the harm caused. The State also argued that, in addition to the administrative request – which had been answered – it had no information on any other request that the victim’s next of kin had filed and that had been denied. 43. Regarding the allegations that access was refused to the documentation on the human rights violations that occurred under the military regime, the State indicated that it was 25 See list in Case of Favela Nova Brasília v. Brazil, para. 66. 11