191. The State considered that Articles 8 and 25 of the Convention should be differentiated, because each article protected different rights. It understood that Article 25 referred to access to the State jurisdiction following the violation of a victim’s right; in other words, the obligation of the State to grant the victim the possibility of judicial protection to obtain recognition of a human rights violation and the consequent reparation. 192. Meanwhile, Article 8 of the Convention referred to the situation in which a person was a passive subject of a judicial proceeding; in other words, he was accused of having committed a wrongful act, which could be either criminal or civil in nature. 193. The State argued that the presumed victims had never been party to a judicial proceeding relating to the case in question, so that it was impossible that Article 8(1) of the American Convention and Article 8 of the ICPPT had been violated. That situation was a necessary condition in order to have those rights, and the State could not be sanctioned for the violation of those provisions. It also indicated that even if it was considered that the right to judicial guarantees covered the guarantee of due process of law, regardless of the capacity of the party (author or accused), violation of due process of law could not be verified in the instant case. 194. In the State’s opinion there could be no doubt about the competence, independence and impartiality of the federal judge who admitted the request to close the case made by the Prosecutor of the Republic in 2008, so that it could not be alleged that due process of law had been violated. The Inter-American Commission’s report did not indicate that there had been any violation of due process of law in the civil jurisdiction. 195. In this regard, it argued that, even after all the evidence in the case had been provided to the Court, no violation of the victims’ right of defense in the domestic proceedings in which they were parties had been proved. 196. According to the State, the facts described in the submission to the Court revealed that the presumed violation of Article 25(1) of the Convention allegedly occurred only in the processing and conclusion of the requests for information by the Federal Public Prosecution Service in 2008. It argued that, contrary to what the Commission had indicated, the closure of the proceeding in 2008 was not due to the application of the Amnesty Law, but rather to the application of res judicata and the statute of limitations. 197. With regard to the temporal limits, it indicated that although States must conduct control of conventionality ex officio, taking into account the interpretation that the Court had made of the Convention, “the court’s 1993 decision was taken before the judgment in the case of Barrios Altos v. Peru (2001), when the Court decided, for the first time, that it was empowered to rule on the validity of domestic laws, especially in the case of amnesty laws.” In the State’s understanding, up until then, the Judiciary had the obligation to respect the legal parameters previously established for the specific case in the domestic sphere and did not have the legal obligation to abide by the decisions of the Inter-American Court in cases relating to amnesty, the statute of limitations and res judicata; judges had to respect the principle of the rule of law and the procedural guarantees of the accused. 198. The State also indicated that the Court’s judgments were binding for the specific case and for the parties thereto, and that it would not be reasonable to sanction the State when, at the time of the domestic decision, that legal obligation did not exist. 41