10 41. Article 29(a) of the American Convention provides that no provision of the Convention shall be interpreted as permitting any State Party, group, or person to suppress the enjoyment or exercise of the rights and freedoms recognized in the Convention or to restrict them to a greater extent than is provided for therein. Any interpretation of the Convention that allows a State Party to withdraw its recognition of the Court’s binding jurisdiction, as Peru would in the instant case, would imply suppression of the exercise of the rights and freedoms recognized in the Convention, would be contrary to its object and purpose as a human rights treaty, and would deprive all the Convention’s beneficiaries of the additional guarantee of protection of their human rights that the Convention’s jurisdictional body affords. 42. The American Convention and the other human rights treaties are inspired by a set of higher common values (centered around the protection of the human person), are endowed with specific supervisory mechanisms, are applied as a collective guarantee, embody essentially objective obligations, and have a special character that sets them apart from other treaties. The latter govern mutual interests between and among the States Parties and are applied by them, with all the juridical consequences that follow therefrom for the international and domestic legal systems. 43. In its Advisory Opinion OC-2/82, of September 24, 1982, titled The Effect of Reservations on the Entry into Force of the American Convention on Human Rights (Arts. 74 and 75), the Court found that: … modern human rights treaties in general, and the American Convention in particular, are not multilateral treaties of the traditional type concluded to accomplish the reciprocal exchange of rights for the mutual benefit of the contracting States. Their object and purpose is the protection of the basic rights of individual human beings irrespective of their nationality, both against the State of their nationality and all other contracting States. In concluding these human rights treaties, the States can be deemed to submit themselves to a legal order within which they, for the common good, assume various obligations, not in relation to other States, but towards all individuals within their jurisdiction. (paragraph 29) 44. That finding is consistent with the case-law of other international jurisdictional bodies. For example, in its Advisory Opinion on Reservations to the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1951), the International Court of Justice held that with treaties of this nature, “the contracting States do not have any individual advantages or disadvantages nor interests of their own, but merely a common interest; hence the Convention’s raison d’être is to accomplish its purposes.” 45. For their part, the European Commission and Court of Human Rights (hereinafter “the European Commission” and “the European Court”) have arrived at similar findings. In the Austria vs. Italy case (1961), the European Commission declared that the obligations undertaken by the States Parties to the European Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter “the European Convention”) “are essentially objective in nature, and intended to protect the fundamental rights of human beings against violations on the part of the High Contracting Parties, rather than to create subjective and reciprocal rights between the High Contracting