3 9. The starting point, in the foundations of my position as to the law, lies, in so far as the case-law of this Court is concerned, in the so-called Honduran Cases. The recognized contribution of the Court in its Judgments on the merits in the Velásquez Rodríguez (1988) and Godínez Cruz (1989) cases, consisted above all in having affirmed the threefold duty of the States Parties to prevent, investigate and punish, in relation to the violations of the human rights enshrined in the American Convention, and in having related the violations of Articles 7, 5 and 4 of the Convention to the non-compliance with the general duty to guarantee the protected rights (Article 1(1) of the Convention, not expressly invoked by the Inter-American Commission in those cases). Ever since, the correlation between the specific obligations pertaining to each protected right and the aforementioned general obligation of Article 1(1) of the Convention, has crystallized in the jurisprudence constante of the Court as well as in the practice of the Commission. 10. However, nearly a decade having elapsed since the delivery of those two Judgments, I believe the time has come to move forward, to go beyond Velásquez Rodríguez and Godínez Cruz. At that time, the Court affirmed the duty of prevention, and clarified what it understood by such duty, but it did not develop its conceptual bases in the framework of the law of the international responsibility of the State. The Court affirmed the duty of investigation and that of punishment, but, in the stage of reparations, it did not order the respondent State to prosecute and punish criminally those responsible for acts in violation of human rights. The Court, as already pointed out, related the specific obligations pertaining to the protected rights to the general duty to guarantee them (Article 1(1) of the Convention), but refrained from doing the same in respect of the other general duty to adopt measures of domestic law (Article 2 of the Convention) in order to harmonize this latter with the American Convention. 11. The contribution of the Court in the so-called Honduran Cases constitutes, thus, a significant first step, but certainly not the last one, nor the culminating point, of its jurisprudential construction. There is a long ground still to be covered. It is incumbent upon the Court of this end of century to move ahead, developing and enriching its case-law in the full exercise of its faculties of protection. 12. The Court, as I see it, finds itself today at a crossroads, in regard to the point raised in the present El Amparo case: either it continues to insist, in relation to the national laws of States Parties to the American Convention, on the occurrence of a damage resulting from their effective application, as a conditio sine qua non for determining the incompatibility or otherwise of those laws with the Convention (as maintained also in the recent Genie Lacayo case, concerning Nicaragua, Judgment as to the merits, of 29 January 1997), or else it decides to proceed to that determination, and of its juridical consequences, as from the existence itself and applicability of the national laws (impugned in a concrete case of human rights violations), and in the light of the duty of prevention which is incumbent on the States Parties to the American Convention. This latter is the thesis which I sustain, on the basis of the considerations developed in my Dissenting Opinions in the cases El Amparo (Reparations, Judgment of 14 September 1996) and Caballero Delgado and Santana (Reparations, Judgment of 29 January 1997), which I here retake. 13. I fear that the former thesis, followed lately by the Court, in the exercise of its contentious jurisdiction2, may have been leading to the impunity of those materially 2. A thesis which appears somewhat curious, inasmuch as, in the exercise of its advisory jurisdiction, the Court has pointed out that "at the international level, what is important to determine is whether a law violates the international obligations assumed by the State by virtue of a treaty. This the