67 f) The Court’s Rules of Procedure establish that, in the answer to the application, the State must state whether it accepts the facts and claims or whether it contradicts them, and that the Court may consider accepted those facts that have not been expressly denied and the claims that have not been expressly contested. “The foregoing is another element which indicates that it is the Commission’s application and the State’s answer that determine the substance of the contentious proceeding before the Court”; g) Based on the foregoing conclusions, it considers that the facts that were not alleged in the original petition before the Commission should not form part of the substance of the proceeding before the Court, except if, having been alleged and subsequently proved, the State has had the opportunity to defend itself and, also, that the Commission expressly accepts that those facts are relevant to the proceeding; h) Without detriment to the foregoing, the Commission acknowledges that, by virtue of the iura novit curia principle, the Court has the power and even the right to apply the pertinent legal provisions in a case, even when the parties do not invoke them expressly; i) With regard to the allegation of the representatives of the alleged victims and their next of kin that the criminal remedies that some of the alleged victims filed in order to try and enforce the judgments of the Supreme Court of Justice were ineffective, which violated the right to effective judicial protection embodied in Articles 8(1) and 25 of the Convention, it considers that “although the said allegations were made by the petitioners in their original petition before the ICHR, the Commission did not determine the existence of these alleged violations either in its report on merits or in its application before the Court. However, they represent additional legal assessments of the same facts which, based on the available evidence, were established by the Commission in its report on merits and in the application[. … T]he Commission considers that such arguments […] may be heard by the Court under the iura novit curia principle.” The arguments of the State 151. With regard to Article 8(1) of the Convention, the State alleges that: a) The right of the five pensioners to have recourse to a competent judge has not been violated by the fact that, owing to the substance of the action, the jurisdiction was changed from civil judges to public law judges, “because the State is authorized to determine jurisdiction in order to ensure a better distribution of the procedural load; this should signify that the opposition procedure existed in both cases and also that both organs are part of the Judiciary and have the same normative hierarchy.” Furthermore, it has not been shown that the change caused a situation of defenselessness or prejudice for the alleged victims. This argument was not put forward by the five pensioners in the domestic jurisdiction, nor did it form part of the substance of the application filed by the Commission; it is “an argument submitted after the Peruvian State’s answer to the application and, therefore, cannot be discussed in this case”; and