victims in the case of the Miguel Castro Castro Prison v. Peru and ordered that they receive compensation. The State argued that it should not and must not be made responsible for all these sufferings, because the State mainly responsible for them had already provided redress. Hence, it asked the Court to declare its lack of competence to examine the supposed violations alleged by the representatives, because they sought to make Bolivia provide reparation to the presumed victims for the supposed facts a second time. 31. With regard to the Court’s alleged lack of competence to rule on the separation of the family, the Commission observed that consistent international case law exists to the effect that a State may be declared responsible for violations of rights that occur in another jurisdiction, when the situation of risk that permitted the violation was a result of an act or omission attributable to that State. The Commission considered that this is a matter related to the merits, which does not affect the Court’s competence to rule on this allegation. 32. The representatives added that in both the briefs of the Commission and their own briefs, it can be seen that the arguments on the rights violated by the State were based on the facts that occurred in Bolivia between February 19 and 24, 2001, when the family was subject to the jurisdiction of Bolivia. In addition, they indicated that the Pacheco Tineo couple would not have been interned in the Castro Castro Prison in Peru if the Bolivian State had not acted in breach of treaty-based provisions that regulate migratory matters, deporting them from that country, which resulted in the harm suffered by the family in the instant case. Considerations of the Court 33. The Court finds that the alleged separation of the Pacheco Tineo family and the consequences of a pecuniary and non-pecuniary nature that they have faced since their detention in Peru, following their deportation from Bolivia, are facts or situations that may be related to the deportation carried out by acts of Bolivian authorities. Accordingly, to the extent that it is alleged that the expulsion of the Pacheco Tineo family from Bolivia was executed in violation of several rights recognized in the Convention, it is a legally sustainable hypothesis that those alleged facts or situations can be attributed to the State or were a consequence of facts that could be attributed to it; accordingly, they could be relevant in both the chapter on Merits, and in the chapter on Reparations, which does not affect the Court’s competence ratione loci. Since the determination of whether or not a human rights violation occurred in a third State, or whether it can be attributed to Bolivia, naturally corresponds to the merits of the case, the Court finds that the State’s assertion is inadmissible, since it is not a matter for a preliminary objection. D. “Competence ratione materiae” Arguments of the parties and of the Commission 34. The State indicated that the documents produced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), cited by the Commission and the representatives, constitute “soft law” and that “its conclusions reports, directives, etc., are not binding for the States.” The State argued that, if the Court interpreted the Convention based on what the indications of UNHCR, “it would be converting ‘soft law’ into ‘hard law’ [and] the Court does not have competence to do this, [because] only the States […] can create norms of ‘hard law.’”31 It argued that the Court’s competence ratione materiae signifies both the impossibility that it apply 31 According to the State, the 1951 Refugees Convention and its 1967 Protocol, which constitute “hard law,” do not establish the procedure that States must follow in order to grant or deny refugee status, and the States “have a large margin of appreciation to define the procedure to follow with regard to abusive or unfounded requests for refuge,” which the Court cannot disregard, by imposing obligations that do not arise from conventions and that are based on UNHCR directives. It also argued that the legal doctrine on the control of conformity with the Convention gives rise to the correlative obligation for the Court not “to create” new obligations for the States. 13