- 2effectiveness of the operation of this mechanism, but also fatally impede its possibilities for future development. Also, as I added in this dissenting opinion, from the Court’s experience, it is clear that: "The primacy of considerations of ordre public over the will of individual States; [both the European and the Inter-American Court …] have set very high standards of State conduct and a certain degree of control over the imposing of undue restrictions by States; and it is encouraging to see that they have strengthened the position of the individual as a subject of international human rights law, with full procedural capacity." (para. 47) 7. Some years ago, before this case of the Serrano Cruz sisters, in Blake v. Guatemala, a preliminary objection of lack of jurisdiction ratione temporis filed by the respondent State and partially accepted by this Court led to an undue fragmentation of the continued crime of forced disappearance of persons, and I adopted a position against this in the separate opinions that I presented at all stages of the processing of the case (1996 to 1999) before the Court. When it ruled on the case, the forced disappearance of the victim had ended with the identification of his whereabouts (i.e. his remains). 8. The situation in The Serrano Cruz Sisters v. El Salvador is of even greater concern. The first preliminary objection filed by the respondent State and wholly admitted by the Court in its judgment of November 23, 2004 (first and second operative paragraphs) results not in fragmentation, but in the Court’s total failure to consider the continued crime of forced disappearance of persons, and all the results of that disappearance, which persist up until the present. In addition, the limitation, allegedly ratione temporis, filed by the respondent State (in the said preliminary objection) as regards facts or acts that “began to be executed” before the date on which the State accepted the Court’s jurisdiction and which continue after that date until the present, does not fall within any of the conditions for accepting the Court’s jurisdiction (under Article 62 of the American Convention), nor is it merely of a ratione temporis nature. 9. As I recalled in my dissenting opinion in the judgment on preliminary objections in this case, the respondent State itself made it plain, by its arguments, that its purpose was very clearly to exclude consideration of each and every human rights violation that had originated in the internal armed conflict which plagued the country and its people for more than a decade (1980-1991) from the jurisdiction of the InterAmerican Court. In my opinion, the terms of the acceptance of the Court’s jurisdiction by the State of El Salvador exceeded the conditions stipulated in Article 62 of the American Convention, by unduly excluding from its possible consideration facts and acts subsequent to this acceptance, that “began to be executed” prior to it. 10. The respondent State’s objection was thus of a ratione temporis and ratione materiae nature, forming an imbroglio of indeterminate time and broad, general and undefined scope; this objection was accepted by the Court for reasons that I fail to understand, when the Court should have declared them inadmissible and invalid. As I stated in my above-mentioned dissenting opinion: "By proceeding in this way, accepting the terms of this preliminary objection, the majority of the members of the Court accepted State voluntarism, leaving unprotected those who consider themselves the victims of the continuing human rights violations of a particular gravity that occurred during the Salvadoran armed conflict, as a result of the documented

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