4 14. Of particular significance is the position of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which does not include the death penalty among the punishments contemplated in the substantive international penal law system. I believe that this fact is especially eloquent, both because this penal legal system has been designed precisely to confront the most serious crimes against the most important right whose protection is of interest to humanity – a protection that suggests particularly severe penal responses – and because the 1998 Statute constitutes the most recent expression of a penal system agreed on between countries with diverse juridical traditions, including several that still retain capital punishment in their domestic laws. B) A RECENT REVISION 15. I believe that I should mention here the request for an advisory opinion formulated by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on April 20, 2004, which was responded to by an order of the Court of June 24, 2005. The Commission requested the Inter-American Court’s opinion on certain provisions relating to the death penalty adopted by Caribbean countries, especially those referring to the mandatory death penalty. The Court decided not to answer the questions posed, because “it had already established its opinion on the points set out in this consultation,” as it indicated in the preambular paragraphs of the order of June 24, 2005. 16. Reading these preambular paragraphs that justify the decision adopted by the Court, also informs us of the Court’s formal position on the issues raised and involves a review of the established case law. This explains my interest in recalling now, in brief, the content of the Commission’s questions and the Court’s observations in the said preambular paragraphs, some of which are reflected in the judgment in the Case of Raxcacó Reyes and in my concurring opinion. 17. The Commission asked whether it was compatible with the provisions of the inter-American system “that a State adopt legislative or other measures that deny those condemned to death access to a judicial or other effective remedy to contest the mandatory nature of the punishment imposed.” In this regard, the Court invoked (ninth preambular paragraph) its case law concerning Article 2 of the Convention, which alludes to the need to adapt the national legal system to the international legal system, and referred to the decision in Hilaire, Constantine and Benjamin et al. v. Trinidad and Tobago. 18. We should recall that the obligation to adapt domestic legislation to international law has been sovereignly accepted by the State, by means of an explicit commitment documented by the ratification of the international instrument. The rulings mentioned by the Court in this part of the order establish “the incompatibility with the American Convention of laws that impose the death penalty mandatorily and, consequently, the obligation of the State to modify them and not to apply them, because they result in arbitrary deprivation of life by not taking into consideration the particular circumstances of the accused and the specific characteristics of the crime.” Likewise, the Court affirmed the State’s obligation “to guarantee the most strict and rigorous respect for the right to a fair trial when applying this type of punishment,” and confirmed the “right of every person condemned to death to apply for amnesty, pardon, or commutation of sentence, in accordance with the provisions of Article 4(6) of the American Convention”.