7 13. Deliberation of the case. The Court deliberated this judgment during its 106th, 107th, 108th and 109th regular sessions. III. JURISDICTION 14. Venezuela has been a State Party to the American Convention since August 9, 1977, and accepted the contentious jurisdiction of the Court on June 24, 1981. On September 10, 2012, Venezuela denounced the American Convention, and this decision entered into effect on September 10, 2013. According to Article 78(2) of the Convention, the Court has jurisdiction to hear this case, taking into account that the facts analyzed occurred prior to the entry into force of Venezuela’s denouncement of the Convention. IV. PRELIMINARY OBJECTIONS 15. In its answering brief, the State presented the following arguments as “preliminary objections”: (i) a recusal of judges and the Secretary of the Court, which was resolved in the order of February 6, 2014 (supra para. 6); (ii) the Court’s presumed lack of jurisdiction to protect legal entities, and (iii) the presumed failure to exhaust domestic remedies. A) The objection of the Court’s lack of jurisdiction to protect legal entities A.1. Arguments of the Commission and of the parties 16. The State filed an objection concerning the Court’s lack of jurisdiction to protect legal entities. In this regard, it argued that both the Preamble to the American Convention and Article 1(2) “establish that, for the purposes of the Convention, ‘person means every human being.’” Consequently, it asserted that the Convention “is not applicable to legal entities and that, therefore, the shareholders who represent the commercial enterprise RCTV are not protected by Article 1(2) [of this instrument].” The State also indicated that it did “not accept the criteria” applied by the Court in the case of Cantos v. Argentina, since it involved an “arbitrary interpretation” of the Convention in order to “provide protection for corporate interests under a human rights protection system created exclusively for human beings.” Furthermore, it argued that, in the said case, the Court “made an inappropriate interpretation of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights when it stated that, in certain circumstances, individuals may have recourse to the [inter-American] system to assert their rights, even though they are covered by a legal concept” and that the States had not agreed to this when they ratified the Convention. Venezuela “endorsed and alleged the first preliminary objection filed by the Argentine State in the case of Cantos v. Argentina” that “legal entities are not included in the American Convention and, therefore, its provisions cannot be applied to legal entities, because they do not have human rights.” On this basis, the State asked the Court to “rectify its case law in this regard.” 17. The Commission indicated that the State had “recognize[d] that, according to the [Court’s] case law, the fact that a natural person exercises one or several of the rights established in the Convention through his connection to a legal entity, does not exclude his possibility of lodging an individual petition before the Commission, or the exercise of the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court to eventually hear the matter.” Consequently, it asked the Court to “maintain its consistent case law” on “the possibility of hearing cases in which natural persons consider that their rights have been violated by acts or omission of the State