4
IV
REGARDING THE POSSIBILITY OF FILING AN APPEAL FOR REVIEW OF JUDGMENT
13.
In its application for interpretation, the State asked the Court to rule on the
possibility of filing an appeal for review as follows: “[s]upposing that, once the
investigations into the facts that are the grounds for the instant case are concluded,
the State, through the Judiciary […] reaches a different conclusion as regards
authorship by non-State agents, would [the State] be fully authorized to file an appeal
for review of judgment before the Inter-American Court, citing as a precedent the case
of Genie Lacayo?”
14.
The Inter-American Commission indicated that “the State has not raised legal
facts or questions that fall within the scope of the application for interpretation
established in Article 67 of the Convention.” It also maintained that “according to the
Court’s decision in the Genie Lacayo case, even though ‘the appeal for review is not
contemplated in the American Convention, or in the Statute or in the Rules of
Procedure of the Inter-American Court,’ it would be admissible ‘in some special cases.’”
The Commission added that “the Court’s case law refers to the possibility of an appeal
for review under very limited hypotheses, and these have not been submitted to the
Court on this occasion[; consequently,] it consider[ed] that the presentation of
hypothetical assumptions d[id] not constitute adequate grounds for submitting
additional observations at this time.” Lastly, the Commission noted that the State had
expressly asserted that it reserved the right to file an appeal for a review of judgment
in the instant case.
15.
The representatives stated that they “did not understand the intentions of the
Peruvian State in this respect, […] because their application brief does not include any
concerns regarding the lack of clarity or precision of the said findings, or the meaning
or purpose of the Court’s judgment.” To the contrary, “the only thing that is clear is
that the Peruvian State does not agree with the Court’s decisions, in particular its
assessment of the evidence concerning the hypotheses in relation to the authorship of
the facts on which its ruling was based.” Since, according to the representatives, the
State did not agree with the Court’s decisions, “the State is consulting the Court about
whether an appeal for review of the judgment is applicable if the domestic
investigations conclude that State agents did not take part in the facts on which the
judgment is based.” The representatives stated that “the State cannot ask the Court to
rule on a future fact, because [this] is not consistent with the purpose of an application
for interpretation of judgment.” They also indicated their “immense surprise that the
State should consult the Court about whether the filing of an appeal for review of the
judgment was applicable, and then, contradicting its own claim, expressly assert its
right to file an appeal for review of judgment if the Judiciary should conclude that the
State was not the author of the crime [perpetrated against] Saúl Cantoral Huamaní
and Consuelo García Santa Cruz.” Based on the above, the representatives indicated
that “the questions raised by the State lack a purpose, because the request for
interpretation is evidently unfounded.”
16.
The Court notes that the purpose of the question asked by the State in its
application for interpretation is not to clarify or to define more accurately the content
of a point of the judgment, or to clarify the meaning of the judgment owing to the lack
of sufficient clarity or precision in its operative paragraphs or findings. To the contrary,
the application for interpretation refers to the future possibility of filing an appeal that
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