8 28. In the application submitted by the Commission, the Court is requested to “conclude and declare that the State of Colombia violated the right to life, embodied in Article 4 of the Convention and Article 3, common to all the 1949 Geneva Conventions... .” In view of this request, Colombia filed a preliminary objection affirming that the Court “does not have the competence to apply international humanitarian law and other international treaties.” In this respect, the State declared that Articles 33 and 62 of the Convention limit the Court’s competence to the application of the provisions of the Convention. It also invoked Advisory Opinion OC-1 of September 24, 1982 (paragraphs 21 and 22) and stated that the Court “should only make pronouncements on the competencies that have been specifically attributed to it in the Convention.” 29. In its brief, the Commission preferred to reply jointly to the objections regarding its own competence and that of the Court with regard to the application of humanitarian law and other treaties. Before examining the issue, the Commission stated, as a declaration of principles, that the instant case should be decided in the light of “the norms embodied in both the American Convention and in customary international humanitarian law applicable to internal armed conflicts and enshrined in Article 3, common to all the 1949 Geneva Conventions”. The Commission reiterated its belief that both the Court and the Commission were competent to apply this legislation. The Commission then stated that the existence of an armed conflict does not exempt Colombia from respecting the right to life. As the starting point for its reasoning, the Commission stated that Colombia had not objected to the Commission’s observation that, at the time that the loss of lives set forth in the application occurred, an internal armed conflict was taking place on its territory, nor had it contested that this conflict corresponded to the definition contained in Article 3 common to all the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless, the Commission considered that, in an armed conflict, there are cases in which the enemy may be killed legitimately, while, in others, this was prohibited. The Commission stated that the American Convention did not contain any rule to distinguish one hypothesis from the other and, therefore, the Geneva Conventions should be applied. The Commission also invoked in its favor a passage from the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on The Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, as follows: In principle, the right not arbitrarily to be deprived of one’s life applies also in hostilities. The test of what is an arbitrary deprivation of life, however, then falls to be determined by the applicable lex specialis, namely, the law applicable in armed conflict that is designed to regulate the conduct of hostilities. Thus whether a particular loss of life, through the use of a certain weapon in warfare, is to be considered an arbitrary deprivation of life contrary to Article 6 of the Covenant, can only be decided by reference to the law applicable in armed conflict and not deduced from the terms of the Covenant itself.2 The Commission stated that, in the instant case, it had first determined whether Article 3, common to all the Geneva Conventions, had been violated and, once it had confirmed this, it then determined whether Article 4 of the American Convention had been violated. 2. Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 1996, p. 240.