2 5. The Declaration stated: “The undersigned Delegations, participants in the Specialized Inter-American Conference on Human Rights, in response to the majority sentiment expressed in the course of the debates on the prohibition of the death penalty, in agreement with the most pure humanistic traditions of our peoples, solemnly declare our firm hope of seeing the application of the death penalty eradicated from the American environment as of the present and our unwavering goal of making all possible efforts so that, in a short time, an additional protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights - Pact of San José, Costa Rica - may consecrate the final abolition of the death penalty and place America once again in the vanguard of the defense of the fundamental rights of man.” 6. The Declaration was signed by the delegations of the following countries, which I mention in the order used by the Chairman of the Plenary Session: Costa Rica, Uruguay, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Argentina and Paraguay (Cf. Inter-American Specialized Conference on Human Rights, San José, Costa Rica, November 7 to 22, 1969, Actas y Documentos, OEA/Ser.K/XVI/1.2, Washington, D.C., 1973, p. 467). At the date of the Declaration, several of these countries still retained the death penalty among their domestic laws. Accordingly, the document had a twofold intention: of international scope, in all cases; of national scope, in some of them. 7. The concern of the Conference, embodied in the Convention, can be seen in the formula used in Article 4 of the Pact, to which the Inter-American Court has had to refer on several occasions. The Article appears until the title “Right to Life.” Under this phrase – which expresses the most valuable entitlement, consequent with the most important juridical right subject to international protection: life – one paragraph of the Article expresses respect for the life of every person, and immediately initiates a normative consideration on the deprivation of life: “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.” The remaining six paragraphs of the Article on the “Right to Life” refer to the death penalty, and they are all concerned with announcing prohibitions, restrictions and exclusions. In brief, the authors of the Convention began immediately to close the door they had reluctantly left open. The same situation had occurred in the case of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights three years before: of the six paragraphs that compose Article 6 on the right to life, four refer exclusively to the death penalty. 8. This is why the Inter-American Court, when dealing with the death penalty in one of its first advisory opinions, indicated clearly that, even though the American Convention did not eliminate the death penalty, “it reveals a clear tendency to restrict the scope of this penalty as regards both its imposition and its application”; and that, consequently, and with regard to the issue examined, “the Convention adopts an approach that is clearly incremental in character. That is, without going so far as to abolish the death penalty, the Convention imposes restrictions designed to delimit strictly its application and scope, in order to reduce the application of the penalty to bring about its gradual disappearance” (Restrictions to the Death Penalty (Articles 4(2) and 4(4) American Convention on Human Rights). Advisory Opinion OC-3/83 of September 8, 1983. Series A, No. 3, paras. 52 and 57). 9. In the years following 1969, humanity returned to the attack, at the universal level and at the European and American regional levels. In 1984 the Safeguards Guaranteeing Protection of the Right of Those Facing the Death Penalty were issued, and in 1989 the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and