6
defendant’s substantive and/or procedural rights, and the reflections that the
Supreme Court of Argentina has revealingly and constructively expressed in its
decisions.
26.
The coordination of the continental system of human rights, in the defense of
human rights, should be the result of a protective trend of dialogue combining the
contributions of the international and national jurisdictions. The construction of a
corpus juris and its applications are the product of collective thought, which, in turn,
is the expression of convictions, values, principles, and shared work. They all
converge to define and consolidate the definitions of common human rights culture.
Hence, an international tribunal will more than welcome the reflections of a domestic
court.
27.
The international Law on human rights has brought about a new approach to
certain rights that are some times associated with the great dogmas of the liberal
movement that introduced precious reforms into the older criminal regulations,
particularly from the 18th century onwards. I am not about to argue that the statute
of limitations (a guarantee releasing the perpetrator of crime from the imposition of
criminal liability) is necessarily one of those “new revised rights.” The statute of
limitations – which reflects the dilemma between justice and certainty – can be
traced to long times past. Whatever the case, under the most constant criminal
regulations, it has become a defense for the defendant, and it is so categorized as
one of the rights the defendant may assert against criminal prosecution by the State.
29.
The protection of human rights against particularly serious, inadmissible
violations that might go unpunished – thus diluting the duty to administer criminal
justice stemming from the guarantee obligation of the State– has caused certain
facts to be excluded from the ordinary statute of limitations system, even a more
strict statute of limitations applied on certain conditions and longer terms intended to
give extended life to the State’s right to prosecute.
30.
However, such inapplicability of the statute of limitations to the criminal
action (and, as the case may be, the power to enforce) should not extend to just any
criminal case. The reduction or exclusion of rights and guarantees appear as extreme
in the analysis of the appropriateness of maintaining certain traditional rights where
the purpose is to provide, through such strict means, to the better protection of
other rights and freedoms. Accordingly, the suppression of traditional rights must be
exceptional in nature, rather than a regular or routine occurrence, and allowed
precisely in connection with the most severe violations of human rights (considering
the contemporary evolution of the international legal system: International human
rights Law, international humanitarian Law, international criminal Law, with broad
normative development and jurisdictional and scholarly analysis).
31.
The significance or magnitude of such extremely serious violations is thus
taken into consideration to justify the reduction of rights and guarantees that would
ordinarily apply, as is the case with the statute of limitations. This does not lead to a
dismissal or impairment of the importance of a specific fact, as the one sub judice at
the national level in the instant case, but to an analysis of the appropriateness of the
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