- 17understood the relationship between the time factor and law. Imprisoned in their selfsufficiency, which simplifies everything, they continue cultivating a pitifully static vision of the legal system and the social acts that it seeks to regulate. 60. "Realists" and positivists have shown that they are blind to the world of values, submissive to relations of power and domination, and insensible to the need to situate legal solutions in time, to respond to changing human needs. "Realists" and positivists only known how to work with the present; we cannot expect them to understand what they are unable to express. They suffer from an atemporal shortsightedness that leads them to continue trying to make abstractions of the effects of the passage of time in the search for and application of legal solutions. They are slaves to the primacy of their own conceptual hermetism. 61. Nowadays, in the domain of protection, the instruments of international law must be used to strengthen the international jurisdiction of human rights protection, not to weaken it. It is only in this way that we can continue struggling to preserve the integrity of the protection mechanism of the American Convention on Human Rights. While serving as a judge of this Court, I would not like Article 62 of the American Convention on Human Rights to suffer the same fate as Article 36(2) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).46 I could not be silent in that event. 62. The automatic nature of the jurisdiction of an international court, such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, is a necessity for the international community in our region. For those of us who believe in the primacy of law over force,47 it is an urgent necessity. Moreover, it is already a reality for some international tribunals such as the European Court of Human Rights,48 the International Criminal Court, and the Court of Justice of the European Communities. The permissive and voluntarist practice under Article 36(2) of the ICJ Statute49 cannot, in any way, serve as a model for the actions and decisions of the Inter-American Court. The law, which is and must be the same for everyone, is above the ‘will” of the States. 63. Hence, the categorical imperative for the compulsory jurisdiction of the InterAmerican Court to be automatic, in order to end difficulties such as those that arose in this case. There is no reason for an international human rights tribunal such as the Inter-American Court to accede, as the Court in The Hague has in deciding litigations that are essentially among States, to the extreme expressions of State voluntarism, by accepting undue restrictions formulated by the States in their instruments accepting the optional clause on compulsory jurisdiction (Article 36(2) of the ICJ Statute). The InterAmerican Court decides on disputes of another nature, between States and the 46 As I explained in detail in my dissenting opinion in the previous judgment of the Court on preliminary objections (2004) in this case of the Serrano Cruz Sisters v. El Salvador, and also in my separate opinions in this Court’s judgments on preliminary objections (2001) in Hilaire, Benjamin and Constantine et al., in relation to Trinidad and Tobago. 47 Cf., in this regard, e.g., A.A. Cançado Trindade and A. Martínez Moreno, Doctrina Latinoamericana del Derecho Internacional, tome I, San José, Costa Rica, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2003, pp. 564; A.A. Cançado Trindade and F. Vidal Ramírez, Doctrina Latinoamericana del Derecho Internacional, vol. II, San José, Costa Rica, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2003, pp. 5-66. 48 Since Protocol No. 11 to the European Convention on Human Rights came into force. 49 An attempt has already been made, in vain, to limit the excesses of State voluntarism under that provision; cf. S.A. Alexandrov, Reservations in Unilateral Declarations Accepting the Compulsory Jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, Dordrecht, Nijhoff, 1995, pp. 1-128.