13
State, - submitted as it was possible to them their points of view in conformity with
their criteria and the premises from which they started 32, disclose, nevertheless, the
artificiality of the fragmentation or decomposition of the crime of forced
disappearance of person.
37.
This artificiality has marked the consideration of the present case in all its
phases, - preliminary objections, merits and reparations. The inescapable truth is
that the violations of Articles 5 and 8(1), in combination with Article 1(1), of the
American Convention, were established as such by reason of the continuing and
complex crime of the disappearance of Mr. Nicholas Chapman Blake, with
implications for the determination of the reparations. The artificiality referred to,
resulting from the application of a classic postulate of the law of treaties, has
conditioned the very decisions of the Court in all the phases of the case, preliminary objections, merits, and, now, reparations. It has, furthermore, generated
a gap between the responsibility of the State Party to the American Convention of
Human Rights for violations of the protected rights and the jurisdiction - limited
ratione temporis - of the judicial organ of protection, what, in its turn, brings about
the undesirable situation of the lack of a jurisdictional basis for the determination of
the engagement of the responsibility of the State for the totality of the acts that took
place, and for the establishment of their juridical consequences.
38.
It does not seem to me at all reasonable that, in the context of a concrete
case such as Blake versus Guatemala, a whole significant doctrinal evolution of
struggle against grave violations of human rights is simply vanished by the
imposition of a temporal limitation, in conformity with a classic postulate of the law
of treaties but to the detriment of the development of the International Law of
Human Rights. This paradox is even more worrisome in the face of the violation of
fundamental non-derogable rights (starting with the right to life), protected by the
treaties and conventions of human rights as well as of International Humanitarian
Law 33; moreover, the Statute of the International Penal Tribunal, adopted by the
recent Diplomatic Conference of the United Nations in Rome, on 17 July 1998, in
determining the crimes under the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, includes the "crimes
against humanity" (Article 5), which, in turn, comprise, inter alia, torture and the
forced disappearance of persons (Article 7(1)(f) and (i)), when generalizedly and
systematically perpetrated 34.
39.
The outcome of the Blake case, pointing in a direction opposite to a whole
doctrinal evolution reflected in the international tipification of the forced
disappearance of person and tending to the consolidation of a true international
regime against grave violations of human rights, is thus endowed with an antihistorical sense, which is to me a matter of great concern. The present Blake case is
in a way a stone on the path of the evolution of the more lucid doctrine and case-law
to guide the struggle against grave violations of human rights. This stone on the
32.
Cf. the oral arguments reproduced in: Inter-American Court of Human Rights,
Transcripción de la Audiencia Pública Celebrada en la Sede de la Corte el 10 de Junio de 1998
sobre las Reparaciones en el Caso Blake, pp. 3-4, 6, 11-17, 19-20 and 22-24 (mimeographed,
internal circulation).
33.
As exemplified by the provisions on fundamental guarantees of the two Additional
Protocols of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions on International Humanitarian Law of 1949
(Protocol I, Article 75, and Protocol II, Article 4).
34.
These two "crimes against humanity" are defined in Article 7(2)(e) and (i) of the
Statute referred to.