is evident or when the representatives or the Commission have committed a serious omission or error, such that the Court rectifies a possible injustice, but this principle should not be used to surprise a State with a violation that it had no way of anticipating and that it was unable to contest, not even at the time of the facts.” 7. Neither of these exceptional hypotheses obtains in the case at hand. Instead, the facts brought before this Court revealed that the decision by the National Congress to remove Mr. Aguinaga Aillón from the TSE was arbitrary because it was made outside the framework of congressional powers and did not offer the guarantees of due process. 8. The legal debate before the Court therefore addressed whether there had in fact been a violation of the right enshrined in Article 23(1)(c) of the Convention. 9. The Court examined the evidence submitted in the process and decided to declare the State of Ecuador internationally responsible for violating that article. The State was informed from the beginning that this provision would be claimed by the victim and had the opportunity to counter the arguments being made. This provision fully covered the corpus of facts brought before the Court, which—notwithstanding subsequent arguments about the Court’s jurisdiction—made it unnecessary and irrelevant to raise iura novit curia as a principle to declare, based on very same facts, breach of Article 26 of the Convention. 10. In the instant case, then, the exceptions available to justify the use of the iura novit curia principle were not present, and the Court therefore could not declare that the victim’s right to work had been violated. The State was clearly rendered unable to counter this argument from the standpoint of either facts or law; as a result, the right to due process that all courts must guarantee was denied. II. Lack of jurisdiction to declare autonomous violation of the right to work, based on Article 26 of the American Convention I will begin my explanation of the reasons why the Court lacks competence for this purpose by pointing to the “law of treaties” which inspires and governs the interpretation of international treaties, including the American Convention. I will then discuss the travaux préparatoires of the Convention, which shed light on the scope of Article 26. Finally, I will look at the origin and content of the Protocol of San Salvador (hereinafter “the Protocol”) and close by setting out my arguments against the majority decision in the case at hand. A. The law of treaties 1. The law of treaties, as we know, covers obligations that arise from the express consent of the States. If the States agree and consent to a particular subject, their will should be made explicit as set forth in Article 2(a) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (hereinafter VCLT). 9 2. Under international agreements of this kind, the States may consent to create courts of justice to apply and interpret the treaty provisions and, in subsequent instruments, may broaden the powers of these bodies. 9 “[T]reaty” means an international agreement concluded between States in written form and governed by international law, whether embodied in a single instrument or in two or more related instruments and whatever its particular designation.”