- 15State Party to the Convention, will know that it should comply not only with the operative paragraphs of this judgment of the Court, but also bear in mind bona fide the considerations of the other supervisory organ of the American Convention and the Court’s associate, and the other treaty-based obligations relating to the rights protected by the American Convention that arise from its ratification of the latter. IV. The need for the compulsory international jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court to be automatic 52. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights41 has, on different occasions, been imposing limits to excesses of State voluntarism. To my satisfaction, over the last five years, this Court has safeguarded the integrity of the protection mechanism of the American Convention on Human Rights and also the primacy of considerations of ordre public over the “will” of individual States. It has also established higher standards for the conduct of the State and a certain measure of control over undue restrictions by the States, thus strengthening the position of the individual as a subject of international human rights law, endowed with juridical and procedural capacity. 53. With regard to the grounds for its jurisdiction in contentious matters, its judgments on jurisdiction in the Constitutional Court and Ivcher Bronstein v. Peru cases (1999), and its judgments on preliminary objections in the Hilaire, Constantine and Benjamin et al. v. Trinidad and Tobago cases (2001) provide exemplary and eloquent illustrations of its firm position in defense of the integrity of the protection mechanism of the American Convention.42 I regret, however, that I am unable to say the same with regard to the decision of the Court (on preliminary objections, and merits and reparations) in this case – although I dare hope that the Court will soon return to its cutting-edge case law on the grounds for its jurisdiction in contentious matters, in defense of the individual. 54. In this case, the Court denied itself the possibility of examining the whole of a continued situation of forced disappearance of persons, including acts that occurred after the acceptance of its jurisdiction in contentious matters by the respondent State, by acceding to an undue restriction imposed by the latter (in its instrument of acceptance), which attempted to remove from the Court's jurisdiction all the acts that constitute the continued situation if they “began to be executed” before the State's said acceptance of the Court’s jurisdiction. The Court ceded to the excess of State voluntarism by accepting a “hybrid limitation ratione temporis and ratione materiae, which is not authorized by Article 62 of the Convention. I regret that I cannot agree with the majority of the members of the Court in this regression in its case law. 55. The notion of continued situation was conceived in international human rights law in order to provide protection – for example, in the case of a complex and extremely serious crime such as the forced disappearance of persons43 - and so as not to deprive an international human rights court of its jurisdiction, as has occurred in this 41 In the same way as the European Court of Human Rights. 42 As do the judgments of the European Court in Belilos v. Suiza (1988), Loizidou v. Turkey (preliminary objections, 1995), and in I. Ilascu, A. Lesco, A. Ivantoc and T. Petrov-Popa v. Moldovia and the Russian Federation (2001). 43 Which, owing to its “extreme gravity,” is “considered as continued or permanent while the fate or whereabouts of the victim has not been established” – as determined in Article III of the Inter-American Convention on the Forced Disappearance of Persons of 1994.