24 89. It also included a procedure for the one-time appointment of the Supreme Court justices by Congress. And it was by means of that procedure, through a Qualifying Committee that examined shortlists proposed by different agencies and sectors of society that, according to the available information, the alleged victims in the case at hand were appointed in October 1997. 90. The State argued that neither the regime of indefinite appointments nor the use of the cooptation system to fill vacancies applied to the alleged victims. According to the State, those mechanisms were regulated by the Constitution that came into force on August 10, 1998, and so could not be implemented retroactively. However, the State of Ecuador has remained silent regarding the constitutional amendments enacted on July 23, 1997, prior to the appointment of the justices of the Supreme Court. As already noted, those amendments already included indefinite appointments and the use of the cooptation system, under a text was reproduced almost identically in the Constitution promulgated on August 10, 1998. 91. Thus, and without examining the suitability of those systems, the Commission believes that the State’s argument regarding the regime that applied to the Supreme Court of Justice is without merit and that, on the date that the alleged victims were appointed, the provisions establishing the fixed term of their mandates were already in force, along with the rule stipulating their “termination on the grounds prescribed by the Constitution and by law”, as well as the fulfillment of the vacancies through the system of cooptation. 92. Now, although the regime of indefinite mandates and the cooptation system were already in force at the time of the appointment of the members of the Supreme Court of Justice who were later terminated on December 8, 2004, the Commission has no information on how those constitutional provisions were regulated. 93. The Commission is aware of the existence of an Organic Law of the Judicial Branch; 88 however, that law predated the constitutional amendments relating to the indefinite mandates of Supreme Court justices and to the use of the cooptation system to fill vacancies, and so its regulation was based on the previous regime of appointments, terms of office, and removal of Court members. As stated by several members of Congress during the session of December 8, 2004, bills existed both to amend the Organic Law of the Judicial Branch and to regulate the cooptation system. At the time the functions of the alleged victims were terminated, those provisions had not yet passed into law. Neither were there any regulations covering the Supreme Court’s disciplinary system, the grounds for the removal of justices, the procedure to be followed, or the competent authority for doing so. It should be noted that the regulations in force at the time of the facts did not allow for the possibility of impeaching justices of the Supreme Court. 94. The Commission notes that at the hearing on the merits held on March 10, 2008, 89 the parties spoke of the existence of a legal vacuum on those points. 95. In consideration whereof, the Commission concludes that at the time of the facts in the case at hand, although the Constitution stipulated the duration – indefinite- of a Supreme Court justice’s mandate and established the system to be used to fill vacancies, there were no legal regulations dealing with those systems or with the substantive and procedural disciplinary regime applicable to justices of the Supreme Court. According to the standards described in the previous section, that situation was incompatible per se with the principle of judicial independence. In 88 89 Available at: http://www.oas.org/juridico/spanish/mesicic2_ecu_anexo47.pdf. Annex 22. IACHR, Public hearing held on March 10, 2008, at the 131st regular session, Case 12.600, Hugo Quintana Coello and others. Audio available at: http://www.cidh.oas.org/prensa/publichearings/advanced.aspx?Lang=ES.