SEPARATE OPINION OF JUDGE SERGIO GARCIA-RAMIREZ IN THE JUDGMENT ON REPARATIONS IN THE CASE OF THE PLAN DE SANCHEZ MASSACRE OF NOVEMBER 19, 2004 A. INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE RIGHTS 1. The considerations and decisions included in the judgment on reparations delivered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the Case of the Plan de Sánchez Massacre on November 19, 2004, following the judgment on merits handed down on April 29, 2004, allowed the Court to return to an issue it has considered in other rulings; the ownership of the rights protected by the American Convention and, when applicable, other international instruments with a similar perspective, which grant contentious jurisdiction to the Inter-American Court. These judgments include those delivered in the Case of the Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni Community, in its own specific domain, and the Case of Cantos, from the point of view on which I will refer to in this opinion. 2. In these cases, the parties’ positions were based on specific individual rights and determined rights of moral or collective persons. They raised the issue of the latter’s ownership of “human” rights and, consequently, of the scope of the Court’s protective powers and decisions. There have been differing opinions in this regard; the issue should therefore be re-examined, based on the judgment to which I add this separate opinion. 3. In the Mayagna Community case, it was acknowledged – in the domestic instances and during the proceedings before the organs of the inter-American system – that this indigenous community was the holder of rights to the property it had owned for many years, which was the source of the community’s “material subsistence” and also of elements related to its culture and, in this regard, aspects of community integration, continued existence and transcendence, in other words, of the “spiritual survival” of the group, if I may be allowed this expression. 4. Given that the material and spiritual aspects of the life of each member of the indigenous community are intimately linked to those of the community, the sum of the rights of the members is made up of the powers, liberties or prerogatives they possess independently of the community itself (such as the right to life and the right to humane treatment), and the rights that arise precisely from their membership in the community, which are justified and exercised in function of the latter, and which, in these circumstances, acquire their maximum meaning and content: for example, the right to participate in the use and enjoyment of certain property, and the right to receive, preserve and transmit the benefits of a specific culture. 5. The collective rights of the community are not blended with those of its members, and the individual rights of the members are not absorbed or subsumed in the former. Each “category” retains its own entity and autonomy. Both of them, deeply and closely interrelated, retain their own character, are subject to protection and require specific measures of protection. In this context, recognition of each of these aspects becomes relevant and even essential for the other. There is no conflict between them, only harmony and mutual dependence. Finally, the collective life becomes part of the individual life, and the latter acquires meaning and worth in the