II. PROCESSING BY THE COMMISSION 6. The Commission received this complaint on June 3, 1998. On October 2, 1998, the Commission communicated the petition to the State and requested a response within 90 days. On December 8, 1998, the Commission received the response from the State, which included information from the economist Roque Sevilla Larrea, the Mayor of Quito. This information was transmitted to the petitioners on December 31, 1998 with a request that observations be presented within 30 days. On May 3, 1999, the Commission received the petitioner’s observations which are dated March 8, 1999. These observations, in turn, were communicated to the State on July 13, 1999 with a request for any further information to be presented within 30 days. On September 22, 1999, the Commission received a second response from the State, which again included information from Mr. Roque Sevilla Larrea, the Mayor of Quito. Friendly Settlement 7. On October 5, 1999, the Commission held a hearing on the case, during which the Mediation Center of the Attorney General’s Office (Centro de Mediación de la Procuraduría General del Estado) offered to mediate the dispute and to begin a dialogue between the parties in order to reach a friendly settlement of the matter. The parties agreed to inform the Commission of their respective proposals and of the estimated time that they believed that the mediation process would take. On October 13, 1999, the Commission requested the parties to inform it of their proposal and of the estimated time within 30 days. On November 29, 1999, the Commission received a letter from Dr. Ramon Jiménez Carbo, the Attorney General, which was dated November 18, 1999, which included copies of the notifications to the parties for the initiation of the mediation process. 8. On March 2, 2000, the Commission held a second hearing on the case. On June 16, 2000 the petitioners presented their observations to the State’s response and also to the positions taken by the State during the hearing held on March 2nd. These observations were transmitted to the State on August 14, 2000 with a request for any further observations to be presented within 30 days. On January 17, 2001 the petitioners requested another hearing before the Commission, which was rejected due to the large number of requests for hearings at that session. On January 26, 2001, the Commission received a third response from the State, dated January 24, 2001 in which it reiterated its interest in seeking a friendly settlement of the matter, which was transmitted to the petitioners on September 25, 2001. The State’s response included a letter from the Attorney General to the Executive Secretary of the Commission listing the judicial actions that had been undertaken by the petitioners in national courts and noting that domestic remedies had not been exhausted. 9. The Commission received additional information from the petitioners on February 22, 2001 and April 26, 2001. The Commission received a fourth response from the State dated September 6, 2001 in which it ratified its earlier submissions to the effect that the Ecuadorian State acted pursuant to the constitutional laws and norms which govern the State. The pertinent parts of this response were transmitted to the petitioners on September 25, 2001. On October 27, 2001 the Commission received the observations of the petitioners to the fourth response of the State, which were transmitted to the State on October 31, 2001, with a request for any further observations to be presented within 30 days. The Commission received additional information from the petitioners on February 5, 2002, July 2, 2002, July 31, 2002 andNovember 5, 2002. III. POSITIONS OF THE PARTIES A. Position of the petitioner 10. On May 13, 1991, the then Municipal Council of Quito (Concejo Municipal de Quito) resolved to declare certain properties to be of public utility in order to expropriate them, for the purpose of converting approximately 571 hectares of land into a public park. Included in 2