48 the petitioners during the proceedings in the military jurisdiction, as they had no opportunity to present a proper defense to the allegations made against them by the prosecutorial agency from September 5, 1984 through June 5, 1989. 182. This Court therefore holds that the State is responsible for violating the right of the accused to be assisted by qualified legal counsel of their own choosing as set forth in article 8(2), subparagraphs (d) and (e) of the Convention, in conjunction with article 1(1) thereof, during the time from September 5, 1984, when Argentina accepted the contentious jurisdiction of the Court, and June 5, 1989, when they were convicted by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, in injury of Mr. Allendes, Mr. Argüelles, Mr. Aracena, Mr. Arancibia, Mr. Candurra, Mr. Cardozo, Mr. Di Rosa, Mr. Galluzzi, Mr. Giordano, Mr. Machín, Mr. Maluf, Mr. Marcial, Mr. Mattheus, Mr. Mercau, Mr. Morón, Mr. Muñoz, Mr. Óbolo, Mr. Pérez, Mr. Pontecorvo and Mr. Tomasek. C. Reasonable time limit C.1 Arguments of the parties and of the Commission 183. The Commission argued that “[t]he parties agree that the process pursued against the [alleged] victims of the case lasted 18 years, of which 14 were under the jurisdiction of the Court. While the State has attempted to justify this length of time because of the large number of accused, the volumes of pages in the case files and the difficulty of performing accounting and handwriting tests, the Commission notes that all these matters in fact constitute the usual activities of courts of justice.” Nevertheless, “the Commission believe[d] that the unreasonable nature of this process should be weighed in its entirety[,] considering that until the date when the State recognized the jurisdiction of the Court, the great majority of the victims were held in custody arbitrarily, awaiting the outcome of a process that in most cases, eventually sentenced them to terms less than the time they had already served.” It therefore found that the 18-year duration of the processes exceeded what could be considered reasonable, in violation of article 8(1) of the Convention. 184. The representatives and the Inter-American Defenders offered arguments similar to those of the Commission, except that representatives De Vita and Cueto also asked for violation of article 7(5) of the Convention, and representatives Vega and Sommer did not apply the considerations used more generally to analyze the notion of a reasonable period to the body of facts of the case. 185. The State, in turn, said, “[t]he complexity of the military criminal case is manifestly evident in this case, not only because of the large volume of judicial proceedings in both the military and the civilian courts, but also because of the nature of the crime under investigation. The mere volume of the case files, the number of pages, reveals how difficult and diverse it has been in terms of procedural difficulty and complexity. It is important to understand that this was not a case of investigating and prosecuting the responsibility of a single person, but at the beginning, there were more than forty. Another factor that had a particular impact on the complexity of the case was the type of crime being investigated: a crime of management fraud. The military criminal case was not in reference to a concrete fact, materially easy to identify and committed one time only, but rather a whole range of accounting and financial maneuvers performed by several different people over the course of around three years in various places around the country.” his direct participation and his knowledge of the law, many legal details that this defense may fail to perceive despite their importance.” Defense brief, October 3, 1988 (evidence file, folios 1311 and 1312).