6 request was reasonable if we bear in mind that, during the proceeding, various statements were made, which, interpreted in different ways, could also lead to different consequences. To sustain its final ruling, the Court must be certain of the position of the parties and thus, have a firm basis for establishing the corresponding conclusions and decisions. This need justifies the Court’s agreement to continue the judicial proceeding and use different sources of information that will provide greater certainty to its final decisions. 21. I believe that the Inter-American Court should take into account – as indeed it did – the State’s acquiescence or acknowledgement of facts, claims and international responsibility, particularly the most recent version that was offered by the Minister of Foreign Affairs on March 3, 2003. Nevertheless, even though this procedural act of the State, with evident pecuniary repercussions, could imply, if considered in isolation, the “unconditional [acceptance of] international responsibility in the Myrna Mack Chang case” (para. 109), and appear as “total and unconditional acquiescence by the defendant State” (para. 111), in the context of the proceeding and within the series of acts that occurred during the proceeding, it does not appear sufficient to sustain the final result of the litigation, without greater analysis. Accordingly, the Court considered other information from the proceeding that, associated with the [acquiescence] and pointing in the same general direction, allowed the final decision to have a firmer and more reliable basis. 22. In view of the foregoing, the Court has relied on the following four sources of information and decision: a) the State’s affirmation, through the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Guatemala, in the above-mentioned communication of March 3, 2003, which that official handed to the President of the Inter-American Court at the seat of the Court; b) the probative elements that appear in the body of evidence introduced by the Inter-American Commission and the representatives of the victim’s next of kin: testimony, reports and documents; c) the reports of a general nature, with specific references to this case, which were prepared at the end of the civil conflict in Guatemala, which was the context in which the unlawful deprivation of the life of Myrna Mack Chang took place (Informe de the Commission para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH), and Informe Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (REMHI)), and d) the book on these events prepared by the current Minister of Foreign Affairs of Guatemala, before taking office, which appears in the case file, and in which certain patterns of behavior of specific authorities are described and direct reference is made to the Mack Chang case (cf. Edgar Gutiérrez, Hacia un paradigma democrático del sistema de inteligencia en Guatemala, Fundación Myrna Mack, Guatemala, 1999, particularly. pp. 21, 58 and ff., 81 n. 47). 23. These four sources of information, which coincide with regard to the death of Mrs. Mack Chang and other aspects of the case sub judice, or complement each other, allow us to affirm that the victim was unlawfully deprived of her life and that, in order to perpetrate this fact, there was an agreement between officials of the Presidential staff who planned the surveillance and execution of the Guatemala anthropologist, and that at least one person participated in the execution who has been prosecuted and convicted of the violation of Article 4 of the Convention, as described in the corresponding chapter. The combined examination of all the aforementioned elements of judgment supports these affirmations. The full acknowledgement of the facts made by the State’s Minister of Foreign Affairs tallies with the information that appears in the other sources. It is in this respect that “the Court concludes that the international responsibility of the State has been established for violations of the American Convention in the instant case, and this

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