5 7. The communication from Luis Alberto Cantoral Benavides, dated March 18, 2004, wherein he repeated the information reported in his previous communication. He also emphasized the State’s failure to pay the expenses resulting from his studies, as the Court had ordered in its judgment on reparations. He informed the Court that he was paying for his studies with the money that was intended for his psychotherapy. 8. The brief from the State, dated April 2, 2004, wherein it provided general information on the status of compliance with the judgments on merits and reparations. The State informed the Court that: a) with regard to the Court’s instruction in operative paragraph 12 of the Judgment on merits and operative paragraph nine of the Judgment on reparations, on November 7, 2003 the Office of the Third Provincial Criminal Prosecutor of Lima issued a resolution wherein it declared that “there [were] no grounds for bringing criminal action for the crimes of coercion, abuse of authority, battery and torture committed against Luis Alberto Cantoral Benavides owing to the fact that such criminal action [was] now statute-barred. The case relating to complaint No. 546-2000 [was] therefore definitively closed.” The State pointed out that the decision was based on the laws then in force; it reasoned that the physical and mental mistreatment to which Luis Alberto Cantoral Benavides was subjected in 1993 did not, under Peru’s domestic legal system, qualify as torture, since it was not until 1998 that torture was “introduced into Peru’s Criminal Code as a crime against humanity.” The State argued that this law did not, therefore, apply to this case, as it was enacted subsequent to the 1993 events. It added that the crimes of coercion, abuse of authority and battery were time-barred, as the maximum sentence for those crimes was only two years’ imprisonment. The State went on to say that “for purposes of statutory limitations, the calculation is made as of the date of the commission of the crimes, but not from the date of the Court’s judgment [on the merits], and certainly not from the date of the judgment on reparations, as Mr. Cantoral would seem to argue in the brief he filed challenging the decision of the Peruvian Prosecutor’s Office.” Finally, the State added that the 1968 Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity entered into force in Peru on November 9, 2003, which meant that it could not be invoked in relation to events that occurred prior to that date; b) concerning operative paragraphs four and five of the Judgment on reparations, on January 13, 2004 the National Chamber on Terrorism sent the State’s Agent notification of a resolution it had issued wherein it determined that “in accordance with Legislative Decree No. 926, the verdict [of conviction handed down by the Supreme Court of Peru] was nullified save in the case of Luis Alberto Cantoral, among others, due to the fact that the person in question had been pardoned and later rehabilitated, which meant that the pardon had rendered the conviction null and voided and automatically nullified [Mr. Cantoral Benavides’] criminal record;”