14
Commission did everything necessary —including reopen the proceedings at the request
of the Peruvian Government— in order to guarantee the unrestricted exercise of that
right. The decision to grant the request of the Government of Peru in no way implied
admission of any procedural flaw. Rather, it reflected the need to remove any defect that
might have existed in the proceedings and to preserve the Government’s right of
defense.
[. . .]
The jurisdiction of the Commission had not expired when it was decided to reopen
proceedings in the Cayara case, for the transfer of jurisdiction to the Court was never
consummated or completed. Such transfer occurs not when the Commission files the
application but when the Court receives it and processes it in the manner prescribed by
the Convention. As the file shows, at the time of withdrawal of the case the Court had
not begun to process the application.
In any event, the Commission believes that the Government of Peru is disqualified from
interposing this objection of lack of jurisdiction because it contributed conclusively to the
creation of the express conditions of which it now wishes to avail itself.[. . .]
46.
that
In the second objection, described as “litis finitio,” the Government contends
[t]he American Convention on Human Rights and the Regulations of the Commission and
Rules of Procedure of the Inter-American Court do not contemplate the possibility of
withdrawing, removing or extracting a case submitted to the jurisdiction of the Court
[and that] [o]n June 20, 1991, the applicant informed the Government of the withdrawal
of the case from the jurisdiction of the Court. In light of the Rules of Procedure of the
Court and general principles of international law, such an action amounts to an
abandonment [. . .] that so-called withdrawal constitutes an absolute annulment of the
action and implies the illegality of the application.
The Commission, on its part, indicated that
the Peruvian Government characterizes the act of June 20, 1991, —whereby the
Commission temporarily withdrew the case from the Court in order to reopen the
proceedings at its request— as abandonment, despite the fact that nowhere in the file
has the Commission expressed any intention of abandoning the application filed with the
Court.
According to the provisions of the Convention, abandonment cannot be
presumed, let alone created through an interpretation, because the effect of an
abandonment is to deprive the victims of violations of human rights of any opportunity of
access to the Court. For such an important legal effect to occur, an unequivocal
statement of intention indicating that that is indeed the effect sought must be required.
47.
In the third objection, “expiration of the time limit for filing of the
application,” the Government argues that the period of three months contemplated
in Article 51(1) of the American Convention must
without exception be calculated as of the transmittal of the Report to the State, for that is
the period set forth in the American Convention on Human Rights (Article 51). As such,
it cannot be amended unilaterally by the Inter-American Commission nor consensually by
a State and the Commission; and even if it were possible to amend it in the latter
manner, this did not occur in the CAYARA case.
The Government added at the hearing:
if [the Commission] withdrew the case on June 20, it did so after the expiration of the
period; consequently, by its arbitrary action it has forfeited any possibility of resubmitting
the application [. . .] [I]t is one thing to suspend it within the time limit, quite another to
attempt to suspend it after the expiration thereof [. . .] [A]ssuming that such a period
could be amended or suspended in exceptional circumstances at the request of one of the