INTER - AMERICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS COMISION INTERAMERICANA DE DERECHOS HUMANOS COMISSÃO INTERAMERICANA DE DIREITOS HUMANOS COMMISSION INTERAMÉRICAINE DES DROITS DE L'HOMME ORGANIZACIÓN DE LOS ESTADOS AMERICANOS WASHINGTON, D.C. 2 0 0 0 6 E E U U May 3, 2012 Ref.: Case No. 12.578 María Isabel Véliz Franco y otros Guatemala Mr. Secretary: I am pleased to address you on behalf of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in order to file Case No. 12578 María Isabel Véliz et. al. vs. The State of Guatemala (hereinafter “the State”, “the Guatemalan State” or “Guatemala”) before the jurisdiction of the Honorable Inter-American Court of Human Rights, regarding the lack of an effective response, since the first steps, by the Guatemalan State in relation to the complaint filed on December 17, 2001, by Rosa Elvira Franco Sandoval to the Public Ministry to denounce the disappearance of her daughter, María Isabel Véliz Franco, 15 years of age, as well as the subsequent failures in the investigation into the facts. In that complaint, Ms. Franco Sandoval stated that on December 16, 2001, her daughter left home at 8:00 a.m. for work; she should have returned at night that same day, but she did not return. There is no documentation of efforts to search for the victim from the moment the complaint was filed until her corpse was found at 2:00 p.m. on December 18, 2001 There were a series of irregularities during the investigation into the disappearance and subsequent death of María Isabel Véliz Franco, among which special mention should be made of the failure to carry out measures when she was reported missing and subsequently when she was found there were flaws in the preservation of the crime scene and shortcomings in the handling and analysis of the evidence collected. In addition, within the process before the IACHR the State accepted its responsibility for the lack of due diligence in the process of investigation with respect to the death of María Isabel Véliz Franco, specifically for the failure to perform any forensic tests on the corpse, the delay in the investigation raised by a conflict of territorial jurisdiction, and for not having established an effective precautionary measure to ensure the presence of one person suspected of the assassination. Pablo Saavedra Alessandri, Secretario Inter-American Court of Human Rights Apartado 6906-1000 San José, Costa Rica The State ratified the American Convention on Human Rights May 25, 1978, and accepted the contentious jurisdiction of the Court on March 9, 1987. In this regards, the facts of the case are included in the ratio temporis jurisdiction of the Court,