51 117. Furthermore, instead of acting arbitrarily, if the State wished to give another interpretation to Decree Law No. 20530 and its related norms, in relation to the five pensioners, it should have: a) executed an administrative procedure with full respect for the appropriate guarantees; and b) in any event, given precedence to the decisions of the courts of justice over the administrative decisions. 118. In the instant case, neither of these two conditions was fulfilled. Without exhausting the adequate proceeding, the Administration changed its interpretation of the norms that regulated the pension of the five alleged victims and, subsequently, disregarded the judicial decisions referred to above. 119. A significant element in this case was the promulgation of Act No. 27650, published on January 23, 2002, in the Official Gazette El Peruano, which annulled article 5 of Decree Law No. 25792. Subsequently, the SBS issued five decisions that decided that the alleged victims should be paid the pension that corresponded to them in accordance with Decree Law No. 20530, deducting from the calculation the amounts of the pensions received between November 1, 1992, and January 23, 2002. The payment made to the five pensioners in March 2002, three months after the application had been submitted to the Court, was made on the basis of the salary of active SBS employees. Moreover, the said decisions reserved the right of the SBS to deduct the amount that might have been paid in excess to the five pensioners, in accordance with the judgment of the Inter-American Court. In light of this judgment, this reservation in the SBS decisions has no effect whatsoever. 120. The State’s payment of the equalized pensions that corresponded to the alleged victims from the time they were reduced implies that the State has acknowledged and complied with the claims made by the Inter-American Commission and the representatives of the alleged victims and their next of kin in this respect. 121. Based on the foregoing, the Court finds that, by arbitrarily changing the amount of the pensions that the alleged victims had been receiving and by failing to comply with the judicial rulings arising from their applications for protective measures (infra Chapter VIII), the State violated the right to property embodied in Article 21 of the Convention to the detriment of Carlos Torres Benvenuto, Javier Mujica Ruiz-Huidobro, Guillermo Álvarez Hernández, Maximiliano Gamarra Ferreyra and Reymert Bartra Vásquez, because the rights recognized in the said judgments were violated. VIII VIOLATION OF ARTICLE 25 (JUDICIAL PROTECTION) The arguments of the Commission 122. With regard to Article 25 of the Convention, the Commission alleges that: a) When the SBS reduced de facto the pensions that the alleged victims had been receiving, the latter, together with their legal advisers, examined the different recourses offered by Peruvian legislation and decided that the appropriate way to defend their rights was to file applications for amparo against the SBS, the State organ that had violated their rights. In its