DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGES ALIRIO ABREU BURELLI AND CECILIA MEDINA QUIROGA 1. We regret to dissent from the Court’s decision to apply Article 8(1) to the decision of the Vice President of the Foreign Investment Committee to refuse information to the victims in this case (see paragraphs 115 to 123 of the judgment). Article 8(1) establishes every person’s right to be heard “with due guarantees and within a reasonable time, by a competent, independent, and impartial tribunal [...] for the determination of his rights and obligations of a civil, labor, fiscal, or any other nature.” This provision seeks to protect the right of the individual to have disputes arising between two parties, whether private individuals or State bodies and whether or not they refer to human rights issues, decided with the most complete judicial guarantees. This provision is the guarantee, par excellence, of all human rights and a requirement sine qua non for the existence of a State in which the rule of law prevails. We consider that its importance should not be trivialized by applying it to situations that, in our opinion, cannot be the focus of this regulation. 2. A basic presumption for the application of this right is that the State has failed to respect a right or that the State has not provided a remedy should an individual fail to respect a right. When a right has been denied, the Convention establishes (under Article 8) the human right that a body with the characteristics indicated in this article will decide the dispute; in other words, the right to proceedings being initiated, where the parties who disagree may, inter alia, submit their respective arguments, present evidence, and contest each other. 3. The case examined in this judgment is clearly not a proceeding. A request for access to information and the refusal to grant it is not a juridical situation in which a legally-empowered State body determines the application of the right in a specific situation in which the norm embodying the right has been contested or violated. To the contrary, the act of refusing access to information creates the dispute and this gives rise to the right of those affected to resort to a body that will decide it, that will settle the dispute, based on its jurisdiction and competence. Under the State’s legal system, this body is the respective court of appeal, by means of the proceeding initiated with the filing of an application for protection. Transforming the sequence “request-refusal” into a proceeding, requiring the application of Article 8 to process the request, would imply claiming that the request must be received and decided by an independent and impartial body and with all the guarantees that this provision establishes (inter alia, respect for the principles of equality and the adversary procedure), since Article 8(1) must be applied integrally and any element of it that is violated constitutes a violation thereof. This would have consequences that are not perhaps the most favorable for the petitioner in terms of difficulties and time limits. It would mean, in turn, requiring two jurisdictional proceedings in non-criminal cases, one to regulate the request for information and the other to review its refusal, and this is not a State obligation under the Convention. The fact that Article 8(1) is applicable to proceedings that determine (rather than 4. affect) rights or obligations and that they are opened when an act of the State has affected a right has been clearly established by the Court in the precedents cited in the judgment. In the Case of Constitutional Court, which examined the application by the Legislature of a sanction dismissing the three victims (para. 67), considerations, paragraph 69, starts by maintaining that although Article 8 of the American Convention is entitled “Right to a Fair Trial” [Note: “Judicial Guarantees” in the Spanish version], its