27
95.
Likewise, the Court has acknowledged that “subjecting a person to official, repressive
bodies that practice torture and assassination with impunity is itself a breach of the duty to
prevent violations of the rights to life and physical integrity of the person, even if that
particular person is not tortured or assassinated, or if those facts cannot be proven in a
specific case.”98 Furthermore, the Tribunal has established that forced disappearance has
often involved secret execution without having a trial, followed by concealment of the body
with the purpose of erasing any material evidence of the crime and pursuing the impunity of
those responsible.99
96.
In this sense, in relation with Article 4 of the American Convention, the Court has
considered that due to the nature of the forced disappearance, the victim is in an
aggravated situation of vulnerability, from which the risk of several rights being violated
arises, among those, the right to life. This situation is accented before a systematic pattern
of human rights violations. In the same manner, the Court has established that the lack of
investigation of the events represents an infraction of the legal duty established in Article
1(1) of the Convention in relation with Article 4(1) of the same, which is to guarantee to
every person subject to their jurisdiction the inalienability of life and the right not to be
arbitrarily deprived of it, which includes the reasonable prevention of situations that could
result in a restraint to such right.100
97.
Regarding Article 3 of the Convention, the Commission and the representatives
coincided in stating that, due to the forced disappearance, the right of Florencio Chitay to
juridical personality was violated, leaving him outside the legal and institutional rules of
procedure and in a situation of total vulnerability before his captors. In that respect, the
State did not accept responsibility for the violation of this right for considering that it does
not have a legal content of its own, as it has been previously stated by this Tribunal.
98.
According to its most recent Jurisprudence, due to the multiplicity and complexity of
this grave violation of human rights, this Tribunal, in the Case of Anzualdo Castro v. Perú,
reconsidered its previous position and deemed possible that, in cases of this nature, the
forced disappearance may entail a specific violation of the referred right: despite the fact
that the disappeared person can no longer exercise and enjoy other rights, and eventually
all the rights to which he or she is entitled, his or her disappearance is not only one of the
most serious forms of placing the person outside the protection of the law but it also entails
a denial of that person's existence and to place him or her in a sort of limbo or uncertain
legal situation before society, the State, and even the international community.101
99.
In attention to the foregoing, although this Court had established, in previous cases
that such definition did not refer expressly to the acknowledgement of the right to juridical
97
Case Ticona Estrada et. al. V. Bolivia, supra note 84, para. 58.
98
Case Velásquez Rodríguez V. Honduras. Merits, supra note 32, para. 175; Case Ticona Estrada et. al. V.
Bolivia, supra note 84, para. 59, and Case Anzualdo Castro V. Perú, supra note 86, para. 85..
99
Cf. Case Velásquez Rodríguez V. Honduras. Merits, supra note 32, para. 157; Case Ticona Estrada et. al.
V. Bolivia, supra note 84, para. 59, and Case Anzualdo Castro V. Perú, supra note 86, para. 85.
100
Cf. Case Velásquez Rodríguez V. Honduras. Merits, supra note 32, para. 188; Case Ticona Estrada et. al.
V. Bolivia, supra note 84, para. 60, and Case Anzualdo Castro V. Perú, supra note 86, para. 86.
101
Cf. Case Anzualdo Castro V. Perú, supra note 86, para. 90, and Case Radilla Pacheco V. México, supra
note 12, para. 157.