5 Mendoza Code of Civil and Commercial Procedure concerning arbitral proceedings would apply. The decision was to be delivered by midnight on June 28, 1996. The agreement added that "the parties may appeal the decision in the event of arbitrariness." 20. As for the ad hoc commission, the agreement stipulated that it was to commence its proceedings before June 21, 1996, with the following terms of reference: …its purpose shall be to ascertain the real truth. It shall issue a decision on the events surrounding the disappearance of persons being investigated in case 11.009 … on the Register of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, those responsible for the events, and developments in the investigation from the outset in the domestic courts, and shall suggest measures to be taken in that regard. 21. The arbitral tribunal created by the agreement issued its decision on June 25, 1996. On July 2 of that year, the representatives of the victims’ families challenged the decision on the grounds that it was arbitrary. The ad hoc commission, for its part, issued its report on August 16, 1996. 22. In a note received at the Secretariat of the Court on September 6, 1996, the delegate of the Commission informed the Court of "the outcome of the friendlysettlement procedure in the instant case" and attached copies of the pertinent documents. The Court requested an opinion on the Commission’s brief from the Argentine State and from the representatives of the victims’ families. 23. The Court then had to determine whether the agreement of May 31, 1996, and the documents that resulted therefrom, i.e. the arbitral decision of June 25, 1996, and the report of the ad hoc commission of August 16 of that year, constituted the agreement on reparations and compensation called for under operative paragraph 3 of its judgment of February 2, 1996. 24. On January 31, 1997, the Court delivered an order wherein it found that the agreement of May 31, 1996 and the documents that resulted therefrom did not constitute the agreement between parties provided for in the judgment handed down on the merits. The Court pointed out two significant facts, either one of which was sufficiently persuasive to show that an agreement between the parties was lacking. The first of these facts is that the agreement on reparations was to be concluded between the parties to the dispute. One of those parties was the Republic of Argentina, not the Province of Mendoza, as the State had unequivocally acknowledged at the February 1, 1996 hearing. Contrary to what the Court had ordered, one of the two parties to the May 31, 1996 agreement was the Province of Mendoza; the same was true of the arbitration decision of June 25, 1996. The second fact concerned the arbitration decision. Under the agreement of May 31, 1996, a party could "appeal the decision in the event of arbitrariness." This means that the decision would be binding upon the parties unless one of them consideres it arbitrary. This is, in fact, what happened, since on July 2, 1996, the victims’ families challenged the tribunal’s decision on those very grounds. The Commission had left it to the "prudent jurisdiction of the Court to establish the presence of the invoked ground of arbitrariness." The Court, however, held that it was not an arbitration