no corresponding service has been rendered.” In addition, the State maintains that Ms. Perrone and Mr. Preckel are entitled to request, without application of any statute of limitations, recognition of their periods of inactivity for the purposes of their retirement alone, even though they shall not be paid their salaries because no corresponding services were rendered. 21. As regards the exhaustion of domestic remedies, the State notes that Mr. Preckel and Ms. Perrone began and concluded a domestic claim, through contentious-administrative channels, against the State as employer, but that they have not exhausted domestic remedies in the sense of Article 46(1).a of the Convention because those remedies were not appropriate. The suit they filed in June 1988 should have addressed the State’s noncontractual liability for damages arising from their arrest and subsequent removal from their jobs and, in such a case, could have covered the claims set forth herein. If such was the intent, the State holds, then the course chosen was not the correct one. The State claims that the job-related legal action was initiated in June 1988, before Law 24.043 established the State’s compensation policy, under which both of them received redress that excluded all other indemnification. Moreover, when they went before the courts in 1988, they were uncertain about the existence of an administrative channel for redress, since the corresponding procedure began with Decree 70/91, which was published in the Official Bulletin on January 16, 1991. 22. The State maintains that the suits they filed were clearly grounded on their relationship of dependence with an autonomous body, and that those suits could not be considered actions for damages by virtue of a generous application of the principle of jura novit curia [the court knows the laws] because that would have implied ignoring the letter thereof. The State concludes that the object of the suit and the identification of the responsible area of government–the General Tax Directorate–do not allow the object of the suit in question to be turned into a damages suit. 23. The State notes that the General Tax Directorate is completely unconnected to the causes behind the arrests, which were ordered by the Interior Ministry; consequently, there is no legal possibility of it assuming responsibility for decisions adopted by another agency. As regards the processing of the domestic legal action, there are rules that clearly indicate what bodies are responsible for representing the State at trial in different situations. Hence, remedies for reaching a judicial ruling on the question of their earnings did exist, but they were neither invoked nor exhausted. 7