58 Armed Forces on June 19, 1991 and November 28, 1991. In the absence of a response from the President of the Republic, the Second Court took no compelling steps whatever to ensure timely submission of information that was essential for moving forward with the investigations and identifying the persons responsible. 307. It was only on May 19, 1992 that the Minister of Defense, on instructions from the President of the Republic, responded to the subpoenas saying he had no knowledge of any military operation in the area on December 10, 1981. He added that the “alleged events” occurred under a previous administration and that any information on the case under investigation should be sought from the officials who were commanding the Armed Forces at that time. In light of this obviously inadequate and evasive response, the Second Court made no effort to reiterate its demand for information, to use other mechanisms such as judicial inspections in military installations, or to subpoena the governmental authorities of the time of the events. 308. Moreover, although the report of the Tutela Legal published in the course of the judicial investigation in 1992 included a series of references to statements by military personnel, the Second Court took no steps to obtain the names of those persons with a view to having them testify. 309. With respect to the exhumations conducted in 1992 and early 1993, the court record indicates a series of inspections in various places indicated by the survivors and the remittance of photographic albums and, in some cases, the remains of the victims. The Commission has no information on the strategy pursued by the Second Court in light of those findings. Both the Truth Commission and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team made recommendations to the Second Court to ensure that the exhumations would help to clarify the events, support legal action, and lead to the identification and return of the victims’ remains to the next of kin. 310. Among other things, it was recommended to analyze the skeletal remains, to send samples thereof to experts for identification, and to interview the relatives to obtain pre-mortem data that would facilitate identification. While the record shows that some skeletal remains were sent to the Legal Medicine Institute in a few isolated cases, there is no evidence of any follow-up in those cases or of any efforts to comply with the recommendations of the Truth Commission and the EAAF. On the contrary, the Second Court decided to terminate the exhumations when the amnesty law was approved. The information available indicates that, in terminating the exhumations, the Second Court did not order the necessary measures to safeguard the skeletal remains found so that they could subsequently be identified and returned to the families. The absolute lack of follow-up to these actions is obvious in the fact that it was only seven years later, in 2000, that the exhumations were resumed. 311. The Commission notes that although no effort was made to carry out the recommendations referred to in the previous paragraph the Second Court ruled, in its decision of dismissal of September 27, 1993, that “there is no evidence of the corpus delicti”, because of the state of deterioration of the skeletal remains and the absence of any “witness or injured party who has identified them”. Similarly, despite having failed to pursue the requests for information from the President of the Republic or to exhaust all means of obtaining the names of the respective officials, the Second Court concluded that while there was sufficient indication of participation by members of the armed forces or the Atlacatl Battalion there was no statement by a witness or injured party to identify the perpetrators individually. The Commission emphasizes, moreover, that by the time the Second Court issued that ruling the Truth Commission had already published its report, “From Madness to Hope”, in which it named some of the commanders who planned and ordered the massacres. 312. Thus the Second Court transferred the burden of proving both the corpus delicti and the involvement of the perpetrators of the massacre onto the shoulders of the witnesses or injured parties who came forth to testify, without taking on the investigation as its own juridical duty and consequently assessing all the available information and exhausting all means within its reach to investigate the facts properly and diligently. The Commission considers that these factors are sufficient to conclude that the lack of seriousness and diligence in the investigations conducted by the Second Court, and their ineffectiveness for clarifying the facts and identifying those responsible, constitute a violation of the rights