2 On the other hand, I do have reason to take issue with the Court’s logic in asserting that the State violated Article 8(2)(h) of the American Convention, concerning the “right to appeal the judgment to a higher court.” For this issue, the Court used deductive reasoning. It departed from a premise that the Court established earlier in the judgment, which is that the State failed to respect the “guarantee of a competent, independent and impartial tribunal, previously established by law,” upheld in Article 8(1) of the Convention. It then noted that “[I]f the court of second instance fails to satisfy the requirements that a court must meet to be a fair, impartial and independent tribunal previously established by law, then the phase of the proceedings conducted by that court cannot be deemed to be either lawful or valid.” From there it concluded that because the guarantee of a competent judge had been violated in the instant case, so also had the right to appeal the judgment to a higher court. In other words, the Court inferred the violation of Article 8(2)(h) of the Convention from the violation of Article 8(1). The American Convention on Human Rights has taken pains to separate the right to a hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal previously established by law (Article 8(1)) from the right to enjoy an array of specific procedural guarantees (Article 8(2)), among them the right to appeal a judgment to a higher court (Article 8(2)(h)). To follow this normative plan, the Court needed to examine the alleged flaws in the nature and structure of the domestic courts that tried the victims (in light of Article 8(1)) and the inadvertent errors and noncompliance on the part of those courts in practice and in relation to each specific procedural guarantee. This is precisely what the Court did, except in the case of the guarantee recognized in Article 8(2)(h). Because they were so egregious, the problems in the nature and structure of the domestic courts that tried the victims overshadowed the entire procedural picture presented to this Court. All the same, the Court should have done a thorough examination of that picture from the particular angle of Article 8(2)(h). Trials of civilians conducted by military criminal courts are objectionable inasmuch as they violate the guarantee of the competent tribunal previously established by law. While they may also violate the right to appeal to a higher judge or court (as happens, for example, with military proceedings in which there is no higher court), it is also possible that they may not. Denying the right to appeal to a higher court would be another breach of the Convention, in addition to the violation of Article 8(1). But if there were no higher court to which to appeal, any finding of a violation of Article 8(2)(h) would have to be omitted in order to respect the rigorous distinctions in the law that the American Convention makes. The combination of factors in the instant case allows the Court to conclude that the victim’s right to a court of second instance was not respected, but not because the courts that heard this case were part of the military system of justice, but rather because they did not function as tribunals that re-examine all the facts in a case, weigh the probative value of the evidence, compile any additional evidence necessary, produce, once again, a juridical assessment of the facts in question based on domestic laws and give the legal grounds for that assessment. It is only for this last failure -and even though I do not agree with the consideranda that led the Court to its finding- that I concur with the Court’s finding that the State did, indeed, violate Article 8(2)(h) of the American Convention.