70 b) by a judgment delivered in another case on June 26, 1990, the Constitutional Chamber of Costa Rica’s Supreme Court held that the extraordinary remedy of cassation does satisfy the requirements of the American Convention, provided it is not regulated, interpreted or applied with mechanical rigor. This Third Chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court did not abide by that earlier ruling in the case involving journalist Mauricio Herrera Ulloa and the newspaper “La Nación”, as the judgment it delivered on January 24, 2001, “by using evasive formalisms, circumvent[ed] the full review of the lower court judgment that should happen with a broad and full appeal”; c) the writ of cassation does not allow, for example, a review of the facts established as true in the lower court judgment; d) in the instant case, the writ of cassation was exercised liberally, but the Third Chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court ruling was a pro forma decision, which dismissed the writ on formal and narrow grounds, thereby violating the alleged victims’ right to appeal the conviction by means of a full review by a higher court; e) in the Costa Rican legal system, the only procedural regime that has no remedy of appeal is the one for cases in the criminal courts. There is no court of second instance for criminal cases, which is a violation of articles 8(2)(h) and 2 of the Convention; f) the Fourth Chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court ordered that to be in compliance with Article 8(2)(h) of the Convention, the writ of cassation was not to be interpreted or applied with mechanical rigor; that ruling was disregarded in the cassation judgment delivered against Mauricio Herrera Ulloa; g) it has been shown, then, that the writ of cassation in a criminal law case did not allow the facts established in the November 12, 1999 judgment of the Criminal Court of the First Judicial Circuit of San José, Group three, which convicted Mr. Mauricio Herrera Ulloa, to be reviewed or checked; hence, the writ of cassation in criminal cases does not meet the requirements necessary to constitute an effective remedy filed with a higher court, in the sense of articles 8(2)(h) and 25 of the Convention; h) as was established in the expert opinion given by Mr. Carlos Tiffer Sotomayor, in Costa Rica the writ of cassation does not allow a full review of a judgment; hence, it cannot be used to check the evidence assessment or other questions of fact; i) the right to appeal a judgment to a higher court can be construed as an expression of the right to an effective recourse, upheld in Article 25(1) of the Convention. Furthermore, the lack of an effective remedy of appeal is a violation of Article 25(2)(b) of the Convention, which provides that the States parties undertake “to develop the possibilities of judicial remedy”; j) elsewhere the Commission has held that as a mechanism for reviewing judgments, an appeal has characteristics that are: a) procedural: an appeal must go forward against any lower court judgment to check for misapplication