10 36. The judgment in the Mack Chang case deals with these issues. On the one hand, it is not satisfied by the prosecution and conviction of one of those responsible for the unlawful acts, when there are elements (including, as I said above, the State’s acknowledgement of the facts) to suggest that they were perpetrated by several individuals. Evidently, it would not be the same if, owing to the characteristics of the case, it was probable and credible, that the authorship of the violations was confined to a single person. In the case to which this judgment refers, the Court has understood that there has been participation in facts that violate human rights, which constitutes criminal participation under domestic criminal law. 37. This criminal participation can include the forms of authorship included in one section of legal writings and is usually established in domestic legislation: immediate or mediate intellectual authorship or perpetration, and can also include forms of complicity, and even concealment by previous agreement between the participants. Thus, it is feasible that concealment is an autonomous offense, owing to agreement after the facts that constitute the crime, as classified in different criminal codes. This is how I understand the statements in the judgment that allude to “identify, prosecute and punish all the intellectual authors, perpetrators, and others responsible for the extrajudicial execution of Myrna Mack Chang, and for concealment of the extrajudicial execution and the other facts of the instant case, irrespective of the person who has already been punished for these facts” (para. 275). The exclusion from justice of one or some of those responsible, should there be several, would maintain impunity and leave the State’s obligation to provide criminal justice unfulfilled, at least in part. VI. DELAY IN JUSTICE. REASONABLE TIME 38. The excessive delay in providing justice is, in some ways, the denial of justice. “Justice delayed is justice denied,” states an old and often invoked adage. In this context, the requirement to observe a reasonable lapse of time when settling disputes related to the issue of human rights has several aspects. The first refers to the time for developing a proceeding against any individual. Thus, the Court has indicated that “the principle of ‘reasonable time’ to which Articles 7(5) and 8(1) of the Convention refer is to prevent accused persons from remaining in that situation for a protracted period and to ensure that the charge is promptly disposed of” (Suárez Rosero case, Judgment of November 12, 1997, Series C No. 35, para. 70). 39. In the premise described above, the requirements of the principle of reasonableness, applied to the time that a proceeding may take, do not cease, from the perspective of and with regard to human rights. There are at least two other cases which involve this principle. One of them is associated with the request for justice at the domestic level, prior to the recourse to international protection resulting from the possibility that the Inter-American Commission may admit a petition, even though the remedies under domestic law have not been exhausted previously, according to Article 46(1)a) of the Convention, when “there has been unwarranted delay in rendering a final judgment under the aforementioned remedies” (Article 46(2)c)). Here the rule of the “substantive defense” of the individual is stated, which is linked to the pro homine principle, characteristic of the human rights protection regime and which may be invoked both to understand the meaning of a norm and also to include it in the principle that justifies it, specifically, in order to rule on a contentious issue.