removed the Constitutional Court, the Council of the Judiciary, the Attorney General and judges. III.2. The effects of a formal conviction against the State 70. It is obvious that the formal sentencing of the State in this case is fully serves to discredit the person who is now the main leader of the opposition to the current ruling party and who, in addition to being forced into exile due to a process of questionable legality, would be stigmatized as a person who persecuted journalists and attacked freedom of opinion, confirming the description of dictator given to him by one of the alleged victims in the publication that is discussed as a central issue in the case and that is reproduced in extenso in the majority opinion of this Court, to which I refer brevitatis causa. 71. This will be the main detrimental political effect for the leader and for the main opposition party to the State government, that this Court’s judgment will have by formally limiting itself to condemning the State. 72. Nevertheless, independently of what I have just stated, in accordance with the highly respectable majority opinion of this Court, pecuniary sanctions are also imposed on the State in favor of the alleged victims which, in all certainty, will fall by route of repetition on the aforementioned opposition political leader, with a clear and serious injury to his property rights. 73. This certainty stems from the statements made by numerous former Ecuadorian officials identified with the main opposition party, regarding the decisions of a state body called the State Comptroller General. According to the repeated and widely disseminated public denunciations of these former officials who are now in opposition, the Comptroller or head of the aforementioned body issues what are curiously called glosses, which are actually non-judicial seizure orders. 74. When the State Comptroller General considers that in the exercise of public duties a person has caused damage to the administration, he orders by his own accord, that is, without judicial involvement, an embargo that immobilizes his assets, and may even do so against democratically elected officials and during their respective mandates, as is the case of opposition legislators. 75. The so-called glosses are usually imposed for millions of dollars, which means a total deprivation of the right to dispose of the property, that is, a kind of general freezing of assets. This automatic repetition of the reparations ordered by the Court will be made against the property of the real or ontically convicted person in this judgment, for the same sums that it indicates as reparation by the State. 76. Although it is almost excessive to point it out, it is known that the right to property guaranteed by the Convention should not be understood in the narrow civil sense of real property right, but rather in that of availability of assets, that is to say that the right protected by the Convention is not only affected when the asset content is reduced, but also when it is frozen. 77. Consequently, an embargo for millions of dollars and that in many cases exceeds the amount of the person’s entire assets, ordered by a non-judicial body and for whose revocation the affected party must go to the judges of an internationally challenged court, brings serious injury to the property right understood as the right to the availability of assets. It is equivalent, then, to a temporary, although indefinite, general confiscation of property, since not only is it not ordered by judges, but it also 12

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