27 a) “Presuming [the Court might decide] to consider that there had been an alleged permanent and continuing forced disappearance in this case, [it was] in order to file the [objection of] lack of jurisdiction rationae temporis of the use of this term.” This objection “should not be taken into account if the Inter-American Court decides to declare the application inadmissible [...] or if, based on the plea and its reasoned object, it decides to consider claims other than the alleged permanent and continuing forced disappearance”; b) The 1994 Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons “constituted the first binding legal instrument in any part of the world” concerning forced disappearance. The State has not ratified this InterAmerican Convention, “but this does not prevent it from constituting [a] source of international law and being applied by the Court”; c) According to the application brief filed by the Inter-American Commission, the alleged violations constitute a crime of continuing and permanent forced disappearance, which commenced in 1982 and allegedly continues, since the whereabouts of the Serrano Cruz sisters has not been established. If the Court accepts this reasoning, it would be applying the principles established in the 1992 United Nations Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances and the 1994 InterAmerican Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons, and this would violate the principle of non-retroactivity of the law and the principle of legality. The Court could consider the alleged violations described by the Commission in relation to the provisions of the American Convention and the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man that have allegedly been violated, but it cannot classify them as “forced disappearance of persons (continuing and permanent),” because this classification and definition of a crime was legally established 10 and 12 years later. In other words, there can be no retroactive application of a conduct classified as a crime subsequently to the time at which it allegedly occurred; d) Using juridical logic, it is almost impossible for the forced disappearance of persons to constitute an integral, permanent and continuing whole, unless this has been declared in the respective conventions. Classifying all violations as continuing and permanent, specifically substantive violations, lacks juridical logic and becomes a legal fiction; e) The amplitude of the concept of forced disappearance, established in Article II of the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons, can allow almost any other conduct to be classified as forced disappearance, given that this concept does not take into account the perpetrator’s intention or the possible special situation of abandon of the subject, and other circumstances that would be required for the existence of a crime or a conduct violating the Convention; f) It cannot be understood that, among their provisions, the general regional and international human rights treaties contain a specific human right to non-disappearance or to protection against the forced disappearance of persons; and g) If the Court considers that the definition of forced disappearance of persons “has been established in other sources of international law and prior