11 context that one is to assess the wide extent of the legitimatio ad causam under Article 44 of the American Convention. 33. The denationalization of the protection and of the requisites of the international action of safeguard of human rights, besides sensibly enlarging the circle of protected persons, rendered it possible to individuals to exercise rights emanated directly from international law (derecho de gentes), implemented in the light of the above-mentioned notion of collective guarantee, and no longer simply "granted" by the State. With the access of individuals to justice at international level, by means of the exercise of the right of individual petition, concrete expression was at last given to the recognition that the human rights to be protected are inherent to the human person and do not derive from the State. Accordingly, the action in their protection does not exhaust -cannot exhaust - itself in the action of the State. 34. Of all the mechanisms of international protection of human rights, the right of individual petition is the most dynamic one, in even granting the initiative of action to the individual himself (the ostensibly weaker party vis-à-vis the public power), distinctly from the exercise ex officio of other methods (such as those of fact-finding and reports) on the part of the international supervisory organs. It is the one which best reflects the specificity of the International Law of Human Rights, in comparison with other solutions proper to Public International Law (as it can be inferred from the judgment of 1995 of the European Court of Human Rights in the important case Loizidou versus Turkey, which is bound surely to become locus classicus on the matter) 31. 35. In the public hearings before the Inter-American Court, in distinct cases, above all in the hearings pertaining to reparations, - a point which has particularly drawn my attention has been the observation, increasingly more frequent, on the part of the victims or their relatives, to the effect that, had it not been for the access to the international instance, justice would never have been done in their concrete cases. Let us be realistic: without the right of individual petition, and the consequent access to justice at international level, the rights enshrined into the American Convention would be reduced to a little more than dead letter. It is by the free and full exercise of the right of individual petition that the rights set forth in the Convention become effective. The right of individual petition shelters, in fact, 31. It may be recalled that, in the case Loizidou versus Turkey (judgment on preliminary objections of 23.03.1995), the European Court of Human Rights discarded the possibility of restrictions -by the Turkish declarations - in relation to the key provisions of Article 25 (right of individual petition), and of Article 46 (acceptance of its jurisdiction in contentious matters) of the European Convention. To sustain another position, it added, "would not only seriously weaken the role of the Commission and Court in the discharge of their functions but would also diminish the effectiveness of the Convention as a constitutional instrument of the European public order (ordre public)" (par. 75). The Court discarded the argument of the respondent State that one could infer the possibility of restrictions to the optional clauses of Articles 25 and 46 of the Convention by analogy with the State practice under Article 36 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. The European Court not only recalled the practice to the contrary (accepting such clauses without restrictions) of the States Parties to the European Convention, but also stressed the fundamentally distinct context in which the two tribunals operate, the International Court of Justice being "a freestanding international tribunal which has no links to a standard-setting treaty such as the Convention" (pars. 82 and 68). The Hague Court, - reiterated the European Court, - settles legal questions in the inter-State contentieux, distinctly from the functions of the supeRvisory organs of a "normative treaty" (law-making treaty) like the European Convention. Accordingly, the "unconditional acceptance" of the optional clauses of Articles 25 and 46 of the Convention does not leave margin for analogy with the practice of States under Article 36 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (pars. 84-85).

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