damage, and the request that the State release all the information on the activities carried out by the Second Army’s DOI/CODI was the collectivity and not an individual; thus, those claims had no basis in the Convention. The State reached the same conclusion with regard to the request that the accused be relieved of their status as public officials. According to the State, the public civil action was inappropriate for its intended purpose. Consequently, it considered that the said proceeding should not be deemed an act that potentially violated Article 25 of the Convention. Subsidiarily, the State argued that there had been no irregularities in the processing of the public civil action. 206. In this regard, it asked the Court to exclude the said action from the case, either because it had not been mentioned in the Commission’s Admissibility Report or because it did not refer specifically to the case of Vladimir Herzog. 207. With regard to the alleged violation of the obligation to investigate and punish torture that affected the right to freedom of expression, the State argued that the supposed violation of the obligation of guarantee of Articles 5 and 13 was not possible, because at the time of the facts, torture had not yet been defined as a crime in the laws of Brazil. B. Considerations of the Court 208. In this section, the Court will develop the pertinent legal considerations on the alleged violations of the rights to judicial guarantees and judicial protection, in relation to the alleged impunity for the arbitrary detention, torture and death of the journalist Vladimir Herzog. To determine whether the State obligation to investigate, prosecute and punish those responsible for the torture and murder of Vladimir Herzog persisted at the time Brazil accepted the jurisdiction of the Court, the Court must first examine the facts that occurred in order to decide whether the death of Mr. Herzog was, indeed, the result of a crime against humanity as the representatives allege. 209. Also, before determining substantial aspects relating to the legal arguments presented by the parties, it should be pointed out that the amnesties adopted in the closing days of some of the South American dictatorships at that time – as in the case of Brazil where the Amnesty Law was enacted before the return to democracy – were intended to legitimate them; positing the illusory existence of an armed conflict, whose supposed victors, magnanimously, closed the alleged conflict declaring that the crimes committed by all those who intervened were covered by that law. However, the context of this case reveals the total absence of warlike acts, demonstrating that, at most, political crimes were committed that should have been prosecuted and punished by law, but that were repressed using criminal methods, and served as a pretext for the persecution of politicians, activists, members of trade unions, journalists, artists and any person who the dictatorship considered dissident or a danger to its power. 210. Thus, bearing in mind its temporal competence and the different law suits and actions of the Public Prosecution Service filed in this case, the Court will make its analysis in the following order: (1) crimes against humanity and the relevant international jurisprudence; (2) the legal consequences of the perpetration of a crime against humanity; (3) the torture and death of Vladimir Herzog and its consequences for this case, and (4) the State’s actions before and after Brazil’s acceptance of the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court. Lastly, the Court will present the five conclusions it has drawn in this specific case. B.1. Crimes against humanity 211. The Inter-American Commission considered that the torture and death of Mr. Herzog constituted a gross violation of human rights. The representatives of the presumed victims 43