comply with the biweekly visitation schedule because her job requires her to work on weekends and the father of the girls prevents them from having a private relationship with their mother. The father makes most decisions without consulting the mother and Ms. Atala is not informed about the progress of her daughters at school or about activities that require the presence of their parents, such as graduations and medical procedures. 32. In regards to the exhaustion of domestic remedies, the petitioners argue that the ruling of the Fourth Chamber of the Chilean Supreme Court exhausted all the domestic judicial remedies that could have been attempted in the suit over the custody of the girls. Ms. Atala alleges that if she sues for custody again she knows that no judge will rule in her favor due to the absence of domestic judicial independence in cases of this type before the Supreme Court of Justice. 20 B. Position of the State 33. The State requests that the petition be declared inadmissible because the facts described therein do not tend to establish violations of the rights protected by the Convention and that the petitioners have turned to the inter-American system as if it were “a kind of fourth instance”, competent to review the decisions of the domestic tribunals issued within their jurisdiction and in accordance with due process guarantees. 21 The State holds that given the subsidiary nature of the organs of the inter-American system, both the Court and the Commission have adopted case law in which they indicate that said organs shall only review domestic judicial decisions when the petition is based on a judgment that violates due process guarantees or appears to violate any other right recognized in the Convention, which has not happened in this case. 34. According to the State, the “lack of foundation in support of the varied allegations addressed in the complainant’s extensive petition ought to be clear from the mere reading of the judgment that supposedly perpetrated the violations described.” 22 Thus, the State alleges, it is understandable that a person who loses a lawsuit should not agree with a verdict disfavorable to them, but “it is surprising that [this person], when she is a Judge of the Republic vested with the power to hear and adjudicate the disputes of others, should dismiss in the terms contained in the aforementioned petition a judgment of the highest Tribunal of that Republic and resort to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to challenge said ruling.” 23 35. The sentence of the Supreme Court, according to the State, does not violate the rights of the girls. To the contrary, the State alleges that the ruling was based on “the imperative need to protect the best interests of the daughters, threatened, according to the evidence in the case, by the conduct of the mother, who opted to cohabit with a partner of the same sex, with whom she proposed to raise her daughters, which was deemed inadvisable for the girls’ upbringing and a risk to their development given the current climate in Chilean society”. 24 The State equally advances that “regarding personal care it is not the right of the parents that is relevant, but the right of the children affected.” The State specifically argues that “in effect, this is how in this type of matters the best interests of the child are the priority, since this is the guiding principle of national and international law. This issue is not considered by the complainant in the petition, but it motivated the custody decision in favor of the father. The ruling was not based on the sexual orientation of the mother, even though she emphasizes this aspect as part of an overall context of discrimination and unequal treatment.” 25 36. Regarding the rights of the mother, the State expresses that there was no denial of justice for her since “even though one could think that the decision taken affects the rights of the mother, 20 21 22 23 24 25 IACHR, Hearing, Case 12.502, Karen Atala and Daughters, 124th Regular Session, March 7, 2006. Response of the State of Chile, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Department of Human Rights, June 15, 2005. Response of the State of Chile, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Department of Human Rights, June 15, 2005. Response of the State of Chile, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Department of Human Rights, June 15, 2005. Response of the State of Chile, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Department of Human Rights, June 15, 2005. Response of the State of Chile, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Department of Human Rights, March 31, 2008. 8