51 four provincial decrees, adopted and promulgated by the Government, which generated legal rights for the petitioner communities. 180. In addition to having generated legal rights for the indigenous communities of the Lots, the successive signing of agreements later formalized into binding legal provisions generated a series of legitimate expectations among the authorities and members of said communities that the Provincial Government would honor its commitments and comply with the law, enforcing the legal rights that the Provincial Government itself had created. 181. These decrees, with the rights and entitlements that necessarily stemmed from them, were not implemented. It has been proven that due to a unilateral change in the Provincial Government’s will, the provincial authorities refused to grant a common shared property title, and began a series of actions aimed at granting separate property titles to different indigenous communities, indigenous families and non-indigenous persons – actions that included (i) the allocation of the property of parcels within the claimed area to individuals, families and communities through Provincial Decree 461 of 1999 (eventually invalidated by the Courts in May, 2007); (ii) the submission to the IACHR of formal proposals for parceling and allocating portions of land through separate communal titles; (iii) the development of actions to convince the leaders and members of some indigenous communities to accept separate community titles; (iv) the sending of officials, contractors or agents of the Provincial State to the field to carry out works of measurement and demarcation of the parcels that were supposedly going to be adjudicated; (v) the presentation of a formal proposal on March 2, 2005, before the IACHR, in the sense of allocating separate communal, not shared territorial property titles; (vi) the submission of that proposal to a referendum; and (vii) the obstinate implementation of that proposal once the referendum was held in October, 2005. 182. Thus from 1999 there was a radical repudiation of the Provincial Government’s legal commitments. The Provincial Government maintained the repudiation constantly during the following years, although on some occasions, from 2005, the Provincial Government accepted that as an exception to the general rule of adjudication of separate property titles, it would grant joint title to those communities that expressly requested it (commitments which were not made effective). 183. For the IACHR, this unilateral denial of legal rights by the Provincial Government of Salta constituted a violation of Article 21 of the American Convention. It disregarded the right of the indigenous communities of the area to the effective application and implementation of the law that recognized their property rights. In addition, such repudiation frustrated the legitimate expectations that 172 the Government had created, expectations that are themselves a form of intangible property. The indigenous communities’ right to effective implementation of the law 184. Article 2 of the American Convention on Human Rights provides: 172 Legitimate expectations are recognized as a form of intangible property in contemporary legal systems and, in the IACHR’s opinion, form part of Article 21 of the American Convention on Human Rights. In light of this legal principle, whenever States have generated legitimate expectations through their actions in the framework of legality, the general legal principles of good faith, legality and estoppel prohibit frustration of those expectations due to a change in the authorities’ position, except when there exists an overriding public interest that justifies repudiation of the State’s position. Persons have the right to see their legitimate expectations fulfilled. The protection of legitimate expectations has been recognized in the domestic law of States within the main legal systems of the world, and it has also been consistently applied by international tribunals, including human rights tribunals. At the international level, particular relevance is attached to the jurisprudential line developed by the European Court of Human Rights on the protection of legitimate expectations under the right to property. The European Court of Justice, in turn, has given solid application to this principle in its case-law. Also at the international level, the principle of protection of legitimate expectations has been consistently applied during the past years by arbitral tribunals in cases of foreign investment disputes. At the national level, the principle of protection of legitimate expectations has received a broad and solid acceptance in the legal systems of the continental European tradition; most saliently in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and Colombia. The principle is also present and has been applied –although with less consistency- in the legal systems of the Common Law tradition, specifically in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Malaysia and South Africa.