3
as a person, to feel myself redressed"4. At the moment of his detention he had 21
years, was student of biology at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos5;
before being deprived of his freedom, he had practically planned his life with the
expectation of being a professional in the future, but nowadays, after all that occurred,
he feels that he needs to be psychologically well in order to reconstruct his life and to
become the professional that he had planned to be, in order to feel accomplished and
not frustrated, as he feels nowadays6.
10.
In the present Judgment, the Inter-American Court extended the protection of
the Law to the victim in the cas d'espèce, in establishing, inter alia, the State's duty to
provide him with the means to undertake and conclude his university studies in a
center of recognized academic quality. This is, in my understanding, a form of providing
reparation for the damage to his project of life, conducive to the rehabilitation of the
victim. The emphasis given by the Court to his formation, to his education, places this
form of reparation (from the Latin reparatio, derived from reparare, "to prepare or to
dispose again") in an adequate perspective, from the angle of the integrality of the
personality of the victim, bearing in mind his self-accomplishment as a human being
and the reconstruction of his project of life.
11.
As I allowed myself to point out in a Separate Opinion in another recent case
before this Court7,
"In my view, one ought to focus the whole theme of the reparations of violations
of human rights as from the integrality of the personality of the victims, discarding any
attempt of mercantilization - and the resulting trivialization - of such reparations. It is not a
question of denying importance to the indemnizations, but rather of warning for the risks of
reducing the wide range of reparations to simple indemnizations. It is not by mere chance
that contemporary legal doctrine has been attempting to devise distinct forms of reparation
- inter alia, restitutio in integrum, satisfaction, indemnizations, guarantees of non-repetition
of the wrongful acts - from the perspective of the victims, so as to fulfill their needs and
claims, and to seek their full rehabilitation.
(...) I am not at all convinced by the "logic" or rather, the lack of logic - of the homo oeconomicus of our days, to whom, amidst the
new idolatry of the god-market, everything is reduced to the fixing of compensation in the
form of amounts of indemnizations, since in his outlook human relations themselves have regrettably - become commercialized.
Definitively, to the integrality of the
personality of the victim corresponds an integral reparation for the damages suffered, which
is not at all reduced to the reparations for material and moral damages (indemnizations).
(...) Article 63(1) of the American Convention, on the contrary, renders it possible, and
requires, that reparations be enlarged, and not reduced, in their multiplicity of forms. The
fixing of reparations ought to be based on the consideration of the victim as an integral
human being, and not on the degraded perspective of the homo oeconomicus of our
days. (...)8".
4
.
Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), Transcripción de la Audiencia Pública sobre
Reparaciones en el Caso Cantoral Benavides Celebrada el 06 de Septiembre de 2001 en la Sede de la Corte, p.
13 (restricted circulation).
5
.
And occasionally gave private classes of biology or mathematics.
6
.
Cf. IACtHR, op. cit. supra n. (5), pp. 6-16.
7
.
Cf. my Separate Opinion in the case of the "Street Children", concerning Guatemala (Reparations,
Judgment of 26.05.2001).
8
.
Cf. ibid., paragraphs 28, 35 and 37.