three expert witnesses were also to be collected, two of them ordered by the Tribunal on its own motion and one proposed by the representative. The representative and the State had the opportunity to formulate questions for the alleged victims and the expert witnesses prior to the giving of testimony and preparation of the expert witness reports, respectively, as well as to submit comments. Neither the representative nor the State formulated questions or submitted comments to the Tribunal. Likewise, the President called the Commission, the representative, and the State to a public hearing to hear the testimony of an alleged victim and the final oral arguments of the representatives and the State, as well as the final comments of the InterAmerican Commission on the preliminary objection and possible merits, reparations, and costs in this case. 8. The public hearing was held on March 2, 2011, during the 90th Regular Period of Sessions of the Tribunal, held in the seat of the Court.2 9. On April 4, 2011, the representative and the State submitted their final written arguments, while the Inter-American Commission submitted its final written comments on the case. Those briefs were forwarded to the parties so that the representatives and the State could submit observations to new documents submitted by the parties in their final written arguments and to other documents that the Tribunal had requested from the State to facilitate adjudication. The parties submitted their comments to those documents on May 5, 2011. III PRELIMINARY OBJECTION ON THE “FAILURE TO EXHAUST DOMESTIC REMEDIES” A. Arguments of the parties 10. The State requested that the Tribunal reject the application in limine litis based on the argument that, at the proper time, it indicated to the InterAmerican Commission that domestic remedies had not been exhausted. It indicated that in this case, “the adequate and effective remedy” was “the initiation of an investigation into the facts alleged by [the] representatives of the alleged victims that are supposedly violations of rights enshrined in the Convention.” Likewise, it argued that “it never precisely determined what crime should be applied [in this] case because of the complexity of the issue of a death that took place in the context of a surgical procedure and medical attention provided by several physicians in trying to save the life of Mr. Vera Vera.” Finally, the State indicated that “Ecuadorian legal code in force at the time [of the facts] called for an inquisitorial proceeding in which it was the judge who was empowered to move the proceeding forward[. H]owever, as a possibility for correcting any kind of omission or, fundamentally, the 2 The following people attended the hearing: a) for the Inter-American Commission: Elizabeth Abi-Mershed, Deputy Executive Secretary, and Silvia Serrano Guzmán, Advisor; b) for the representatives, Mr. César Duque, Legal Advisor of the CEDHU; and c) for the State, Carlos Espín Arias, Legal Assistant 2 and Alonso Fonseca Garcés, Supervising Litigation Attorney 2. 5