6 limitations – which reflects the dilemma between justice and certainty – can be traced to long times past. Whatever the case, under the most constant criminal regulations, it has become a defense for the defendant, and it is so categorized as one of the rights the defendant may assert against criminal prosecution by the State. 29. The protection of human rights against particularly serious, inadmissible violations that might go unpunished – thus diluting the duty to administer criminal justice stemming from the guarantee obligation of the State– has caused certain facts to be excluded from the ordinary statute of limitations system, even a more strict statute of limitations applied on certain conditions and longer terms intended to give extended life to the State’s right to prosecute. 30. However, such inapplicability of the statute of limitations to the criminal action (and, as the case may be, the power to enforce) should not extend to just any criminal case. The reduction or exclusion of rights and guarantees appear as extreme in the analysis of the appropriateness of maintaining certain traditional rights where the purpose is to provide, through such strict means, to the better protection of other rights and freedoms. Accordingly, the suppression of traditional rights must be exceptional in nature, rather than a regular or routine occurrence, and allowed precisely in connection with the most severe violations of human rights (considering the contemporary evolution of the international legal system: International human rights Law, international humanitarian Law, international criminal Law, with broad normative development and jurisdictional and scholarly analysis). 31. The significance or magnitude of such extremely serious violations is thus taken into consideration to justify the reduction of rights and guarantees that would ordinarily apply, as is the case with the statute of limitations. This does not lead to a dismissal or impairment of the importance of a specific fact, as the one sub judice at the national level in the instant case, but to an analysis of the appropriateness of the application of the statute of limitations in that case. In my opinion, the InterAmerican Court is moving towards more specific decisions on the matter. It has not changed its view. It has more specifically or better formulated it, acting on the concerns raised by the domestic courts. Judge Sergio García-Ramírez President Pablo Saavedra-Alessandri Secretary