26 91. Furthermore, in its Judgment of 08.07.2004 in the Gómez Paquiyauri versus Peru case, the Inter-American Court expressly admitted that, in our days, an international juridical regime has been formed of absolute prohibition of all forms of torture and of extrajudicial executions, and that such prohibition belongs today to the domain of international jus cogens (pars. 115-116 and 131) 99. In my Separate Opinion in that case I pondered that such acknowledgement of jus cogens, in constant expansion, in turn, "reveals precisely the reassuring opening of contemporary international law to superior and fundamental values", pointing towards the emergence of a truly universal international law (par. 44). I reaffirmed this understanding, of an absolute prohibition, of jus cogens, of torture, in any circumstance, in my Separate Opinion (par. 26) in the Tibi versus Ecuador case (Judgment of 07.09.2004). 92. The Judgment this Court has just adopted in the present Caesar versus Trinidad and Tobago fits squarely into its jurisprudence constante on the evolutive interpretation of jus cogens itself. The Court, here, quite rightly takes a step forward, in upholding the absolute prohibition, proper to the domain of jus cogens, of torture as well as any other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. It is relevant to keep on identifying the expanding material content and scope of jus cogens, as the InterAmerican Court has been doing in the last years. The Inter-American Court has probably done for such identification of the expansion of jus cogens more than any other contemporary international tribunal. It is important that it continues doing so, in the gradual construction, at this beginning of the XXIst. century, of a new jus gentium, the international law for humankind. Antônio Augusto Cançado Trindade Judge Pablo Saavedra-Alessandri Secretary 99 . Likewise, the Ad Hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, on its turn, held, in the A. Furundzija case (Judgment of 10.12.1998), that the absolute prohibition of torture has the character of a norm of jus cogens (pars. 137-139, 144 and 160).

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