DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE A.A. CANÇADO TRINDADE 1. I regret that I am unable to share the majority decision of the judges of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the third and fourth operative paragraphs, and the principle it adopted on these points in the considering paragraphs 125 and 130 to 132, respectively, of the judgment on merits and reparations in The Serrano Cruz Sisters v. El Salvador, because the Court based the judgment on its previous decision (judgment on preliminary objections of November 23, 2004) concerning the first preliminary objection ratione temporis (and, in reality, ratione materiae also) filed by the respondent State. 2. I consider that this objection, accepted by the Court with my dissenting opinion, prevented it, unduly, from considering facts and acts that began to be executed prior to the date on which the State accepted the Court’s compulsory jurisdiction (June 6, 1995) and which continued after the date of that acceptance and up until the present – a decision which I opposed for the reasons described in my previous dissenting opinion (judgment on preliminary objections of November 23, 2004). 3. That decision has conditioned the Court’s judgment on merits and reparations, leading it, in the instant case, to limit its powers of protection under the Convention – a limitation that I consider unacceptable. Consequently, in this dissenting opinion to the judgment on merits and reparations in the Serrano Cruz Sisters case, I am obliged to record my personal observations justifying my position. 4. My observations relate to seven specific points, which are: (a) the need to overcome excesses of State voluntarism; (b) the development and relevance of the right to identity; (c) the key importance of the rights of the child in this case; (d) the broad scope of the right to life; (e) subsistence of State responsibility even though the Court limited its own jurisdiction in this case; (f) the need for the compulsory international jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court to be automatic; and (g) the perennial challenge of the issue of the relationship between time and law. I. Towards overcoming excesses of State voluntarism 5. In my above-mentioned dissenting opinion in the judgment on preliminary objections in this case, I stated that: "By protecting fundamental values shared by the international community as a whole, contemporary international law has overcome the anachronic voluntarist conception belonging to a distant past. Contrary to what some rare, nostalgic survivors of the apogee of positivism-voluntarism presume, the methodology of interpreting human rights treaties developed on the basis of rules of interpretation embodied in international law (such as those stipulated in Articles 31 to 33 of the 1969 and 1986 Vienna Conventions on the Law of Treaties) applies to both the substantive provisions (on the protected rights) and the clauses that regulate international protection mechanisms – based on the principle ut res magis valeat quam pereat, which corresponds to the so-called effet utile (sometimes called the principle of effectiveness), amply supported by international case law.” (para. 7) 6. Indeed, it would be inadmissible to subordinate the operation of the treatybased protection mechanism to conditions that were not expressly authorized by Article 62 of the American Convention, because this would not only affect immediately the