3 as can be seen in the joint separate opinion issued by Judge Alirio Abreu Burelli and I, five years’ ago, adopting a criterion on which I have insisted in other separate opinions relating to provisional measures that have followed the precedent established in that case. B) Indigenous communities 11. During its sixty-seventh regular session (June 13 to 30, 2005), the InterAmerican Court deliberated and delivered judgment on several cases in which the considerations that I am setting out in this opinion attached to the judgment in YATAMA v. Nicaragua are applicable. Evidently, I refer to the latter, and the final rulings in the Moiwana Community v. Suriname and in the Indigenous Community Yakye Axa v. Paraguay; also, to some extent, the order for provisional measures in the Matter of the Pueblo Indigena de Sarayaku, concerning Ecuador. 12. These three contentious cases, which have culminated in judgments on merits and reparations, examine points related to issues that involve the members of indigenous and ethnic communities, as such – not for strictly personal or individual motives – and which have their origin or development in the relationship that these communities have historically kept and still maintain with other sectors of society and, evidently, with the State itself, a relationship that affects the members of these groups and has an impact on their human rights. Obviously, this does not refer to isolated issues or issues exclusive to the States or national societies within which the conflicts examined in these cases have arisen, although the judgments refer – as is natural – exclusively to these conflicts and do not attempt – nor could they attempt – to affect other current or potential cases. 13. For anyone who studies these issues – and, in any case, for the author of this opinion – it is interesting to observe that, in other parts of the American continent, problems such as those examined herein have also arisen, and they have been brought to the attention of the Court with increasing frequency and have produced certain developments in its case law. These developments, which are binding in the sphere of each judgment, could be of interest in a broader sphere – as I have mentioned above – bearing in mind the great similarity and even sameness of the juridical, social and cultural conditions – historical and actual – that are found at the origin of the disputes observed in very diverse national territories. 14. Some significant precedents should be recalled, as a useful reference for the identification of certain categories of cases and the definition of the general profile of our case law. The list begins, probably, with the Case of Aloeboetoe, one of the oldest in the case history of the Inter-American Court, in which issues associated with the victims’ membership in a specific minority group were presented. Likewise, the case of the Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni Community of Nicaragua should be stressed; this has special relevance since it engendered a wide-reaching examination of the rights of the members of indigenous communities in an American country. I also attached a separate opinion to that judgment in which I referred extensively to these issues. 15. Evidently, there have been other cases in which issues of membership in indigenous communities and cultures has been relevant; they reveal the right to identity and the different implication that this can and does have under the American Convention. All this invites us to consider that we are not looking at occasional, isolated cases, circumscribed to a single area, or to ordinary disputes that must be