ORDER OF THE INTER-AMERICAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS SEPTEMBER 7, 2001 PROVISIONAL MEASURES REQUESTED BY THE INTER-AMERICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE MATTER OF THE REPUBLIC OF COSTA RICA THE “LA NACIÓN” CASE HAVING SEEN: 1. The brief that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (hereinafter “the Commission” or “the Inter-American Commission”) filed on March 28, 2001, wherein it submitted a request seeking provisional measures on behalf of Mauricio Herrera Ulloa, attorney, and Fernán Vargas Rohrmoser, journalist with the Costa Rican newspaper La Nación. Specifically, the Commission was petitioning the Court to call upon the State of Costa Rica (hereinafter “the State” or “Costa Rica”) to: 1) suspend execution of the November 12, 1999 conviction handed down by the San José First Circuit Criminal Trial Court until such time as the Commission has examined the case and, pursuant to Article 50 of the American Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter “the Convention” or “the American Convention”), has arrived at a final decision on the merits of the case or, should the Court admit the case, until such time as it has delivered its judgment on the matter; 2) refrain for taking any action designed to enter the name of journalist Mauricio Herrera Ulloa in the Costa Rican Judiciary’s Record of Convicted Felons, and 3) refrain from taking any measure or action that might infringe the right to freedom of expression that journalist Mauricio Herrera Ulloa and the newspaper La Nación enjoy; The Commission based its request on the following: a) journalist Mauricio Herrera Ulloa was convicted on four counts of varying degrees of libel because of articles he published in the newspaper La Nación that quoted reports carried in a European newspaper about a “controversial” Costa Rican Foreign Service official accredited to the International Atomic Energy Organization, headquartered in Vienna; and b) the judgment of the San José First Circuit Criminal Trial Court was: to order a forty-day fine on each of the four counts, at a rate of two thousand five hundred colones per day, for a total fine of 160 days which, when the rule for appearance in court was applied, was reduced to three times the greatest fine, in other words, a fine of 120 days for a total of three hundred thousand colones; to find for the plaintiff in the civil damages suit, ordering Mauricio Herrera Ulloa and the newspaper La Nación, S.A., represented by Fernán Vargas Rohrmoser, as jointly and severally liable, to pay moral damages of sixty million colones as compensatory damages for the stories reported in La Nación on May 19, 20 and 21 and December 13, 1995; to order that the court’s ruling be published in the newspaper La Nación, in the