3 giving the latter all necessary guarantees to be able to defend himself, and to ensure that the greatest justice is done. XIV. However, the Court’s authority to review domestic trials is limited. When a matter reaches the Court, it has already been decided by the domestic courts. These courts have heard the case and gathered the corresponding evidence directly; consequently, the international organ, which intervenes a posteriori and does not take part directly and personally in gathering the evidence, cannot re-assess the evidence and judge the case anew. XV. Bearing this in mind, the Inter-American Court, like all the other organs of international supervision, has taken and continues to take great care not to transform itself into one more court, and restricts its work to ensuring that the domestic proceedings have complied scrupulously with the obligations established in Article 8 of the Convention. The Court does not re-assess the evidence of the trial in question, in order to decide, for example, that a defendant in a criminal trial is innocent; rather, it considers whether the domestic courts that decided the case were independent and impartial, whether they have respected the obligation to, inter alia, grant adequate time and conditions for preparing the defense and give the parties the possibility of contesting the evidence submitted against them; in brief, whether there has been a violation of the basic procedural norms established in Article 8. XVI. In this opinion, I will examine what I believe is one of the fundamental defects of the second trial against Ms. Berenson: the evidence that was admitted. XVII. This Court has decided that paragraphs (b), (c), (d) and (f) of Article 8(2) of the Convention were violated in the trial against Ms. Berenson before the military court. A logical consequence of this is that the evidence submitted in this trial has no validity for this Court. The Court states this in paragraph 171, when it establishes that “[t]aking into account the characteristics of the military trial, about which this Court has already ruled, and also the arguments of the alleged victim’s defense lawyers concerning the ‘allegedly unlawful origin of the evidence adduced’ and the ‘unconstitutional nature of the legislative framework in force’, this Court will only refer to the trial held directly before the civil court.” XVIII. Moreover, in this case, it is clear that evidence was admitted in the trial in the civil jurisdiction that had been gathered in the trial before the military court, and this Court does not consider such evidence valid. The complaint filed the Provincial Prosecutor ad hoc offered as proof “the significance of the evidence in the case files forwarded by the Exclusive Military Jurisdiction” (Proven facts, paragraph 88(47)). The Superior Prosecutor indicated that the facts described in the Prosecutor’s Report of February 15, 2001, had been confirmed, inter alia, by the police investigation report and the records of the house search of two buildings from the trial before the military court. The report also offered as evidence four attachments with documentation from the same military trial (idem, paragraph 88(55)). XIX. Lori Berenson’s defense lawyers contested the validity of these elements of evidence in different ways, one of which was to ask that the file of the case before the military court should be submitted to the trial before the ordinary judge, “in order to verify that the trial complied with the norms of due process of law and to examine the proceedings of the military court, from a judicial perspective” (paragraph 88(57)). They also contested the veracity of the police deposition.