2 clarify - also for future cases - the juridical nature and extent of the right of individual petition under Article 44 of the American Convention. I. Consolidation, Juridical Nature and Scope of the Right of Individual Petition. 5. The right of individual petition is a definitive conquest of the International Law of Human Rights. It is of the essence itself of the international protection of human rights the contraposition between the individual complainants and the respondent States in cases of alleged violations of the protected rights. It was precisely in this context of protection that the historical rescue took place of the position of the human being as subject of the International Law of Human Rights, endowed with full international procedural capacity. 6. Three centuries of an international legal order crystallized, as from the treaties of peace of Westphalia (1648), on the basis of the co-ordination of independent nation-States, of the juxtaposition of absolute sovereignties, led to the exclusion from that legal order of the individuals as subjects of rights (titulaires de droits). At international level, the States assumed the monopoly of the condition of subjects of rights; the individuals, for their protection, were left entirely at the mercy of the discretionary intermediation of their nation-States. The international legal order thus erected, - which the excesses of legal positivism attempted in vain to justify, - excluded therefrom precisely the ultimate addressee of the juridical norms: the human being. 7. Three centuries of an international legal order marked by the prevalence of State sovereignties and by the exclusion of the individuals were incapable to avoid the massive violations of human rights, perpetrated in all regions of the world, and the successive atrocities of our century, including the ones that take place nowadays4. Such atrocities awoke the universal juridical conscience to the necessity to reconceptualize the foundations themselves of the international legal order, restoring to the human being the central position from where he had been displaced. This reconstruction, on human foundations, took as conceptual basis entirely distinct canons, such as those of the realization of superior common values, of the human being as subject of rights (titulaire de droits), of the collective guarantee of the realization of these latter, and of the objective character of the obligations of protection5. The international order of sovereignties yielded to that of solidarity. 8. This profound transformation of the international legal order, precipitated as from the Universal and American Declarations of Human Rights of 1948, completing this year half a century of evolution, has not taken place without difficulties, precisely for requiring a new mentality. It underwent, moreover, stages, some of which no longer sufficiently studied nowadays, also with regard to the consolidation of the right of individual petition. Already in the beginnings of the exercise of this right it was stressed that, although motivated by the search for individual redress, 3. Such as the holocaust, the gulag, followed by new acts of genocide, e.g., in South-East Asia, in central Europe (ex-Iugoslavia), in Africa (Rwanda). 4. With a direct incidence of those canons in the methods of interpretation of the international norms of protection, without necessarily departing from the general rules of interpretation of treaties set forth in Articles 31-33 of the two Vienna Conventions on the Law of Treaties (of 1969 and 1986).