SEPARATE OPINION OF JUDGE A.A. CANÇADO TRINDADE 1. I have concurred with my vote to the adoption of the present Judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on Preliminary Objections in the Las Palmeras case concerning Colombia, whereby the Court has dismissed the first, fourth and fifth objections, and has sustained the second and third preliminary objections interposed by the respondent State. I understand that the Court has reached a well-founded decision and in full conformity with the relevant norms of the American Convention on Human Rights. As, moreover, the debates on the case in the public hearing before the Court have transcended the question of the application of such norms and have raised theoretical points of juridical epistemology of great importance, I feel obliged to express, for the records, my personal reflections on the matter, oriented towards the progressive development of the International Law of Human Rights. 2. In the public hearing of 31 May 1999 before the Court on the present Las Palmeras case, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in seeking to sustain a coextensive interpretation and application of Article 4 of the American Convention on Human rights and of Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions on International Humanitarian Law (of 1949), related this point to the question of the existence and observance of the obligations erga omnes of protection 1. This is a theme which is particularly dear to me, as already for some time I have been sustaining, within the Court, the urgent need to promote the doctrinal and jurisprudential development of the legal regime of the obligations erga omnes of protection of the rights of the human being aiming at securing their application in practice, what is bound to foster greatly the future evolution of the International Law of Human Rights 2. 3. The pleadings of the Inter-American Commssion in the aforementioned public hearing before the Court of 31.05.1999 in the present Las Palmeras case, pertaining to Colombia, correspond, thus, to the concerns which I have already expressed in the Court - mainly in the Blake versus Guatemala case (1998-1999) - about the need to devote greater attention to this theme 3. In that memorable hearing in the present Las Palmeras case, there was no discrepancy between the Commission and the respondent State - in a noticeable demonstration, on the part of both, of procedural 1. Cf. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Las Palmeras Case - Transcripción de la Audiencia Pública sobre las Excepciones Preliminares Celebrada el 31 de Mayo de 1999 en la Sede de la Corte, pp. 19-20 and 35-38 (mimeographed - internal circulation). 2. Thus, for example, in my Separate Opinion in the Court's Judgment (of 24.01.1998) in the Blake versus Guatemala case (Merits), I pondered: - "The consolidation of erga omnes obligations of protection, as a manifestation of the emergence itself of imperative norms of international law, would represent the overcoming of the pattern erected upon the autonomy of the will of the State. The absolute character of the autonomy of the will can no longer be invoked in view of the existence of norms of jus cogens. It is not reasonable that the contemporary law of treaties continues to align itself to a pattern from which it sought gradually to free itself, in giving expression to the concept of jus cogens in the two Vienna Conventions on the Law of Treaties. (...)" (paragraph 28). - Subsequently, in my Separate Opinion in the Court's Judgment (of 22.01.1999) in the same Blake versus Guatemala case (Reparations), I added: "Our purpose ought to lie precisely upon the doctrinal and jurisprudencial development of the peremptory norms of International Law (jus cogens) and of the corresponding obligations erga omnes of protection of the human being. It is by means of the development in this sense that we will achieve to overcome the obstacles of the dogmas of the past, as well as the current inadequacies and ambiguities of the law of treaties, so as to bring us closer to the plenitude of the international protection of the human being" (paragraph 40). 3. Cf. quotations in note (2), supra.

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