16 b) The fact that the State paid the amount corresponding to nonpecuniary damage after the time limit had passed; that it established the pecuniary compensation without justification or normative support; that it disregarded the applicable domestic legislation (which would be the legislation in force at the time of the violations) when it established the compensation based on arbitrary criteria, and that it subtracted income tax from the compensation, caused the Court, in the Order of November 22, 2002, “to remind the State of the terms of the reparation that it had ordered in its judgment of February 2001”; c) Since “Panama questioned the authority of the Court to monitor compliance with its judgments,” the latter “proceeded to ratify its decisions in the Order of June 6, 2003”; d) The Orders of the Court of November 22, 2002, and June 6, 2003, “did not modify the judgment of the Court, but clarified its scope in light of the State’s conduct.” The Court clarified how the reparations it had ordered should be executed, “they are orders to ensure compliance and were never intended to interpret the judgment of February 2001”; e) Article 68(1) of the Convention “refers to the fact that the decisions [Note: translated as “judgments” in the English version] of the Court are obligatory, without distinguishing whether they are judgments, provisional measures, or any other type of decisions, so that they may be extended to any type of resolution issued by the Court that explicitly entails some kind of obligation for the State”; f) The State’s voluntary acceptance of the competence of the Court and its commitment to respect the American Convention, particularly Article 68 thereof, signifies that “States must adopt at the domestic level all those mechanisms of domestic law that ensure the faithful execution of the judgments of the Inter-American Court in order to comply with the purpose and goals of the Convention”. That is to say, there is a State commitment that the treaty provisions will be effective in domestic law, and this affirmation is consequent with the pacta sunt servanda principle established in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. g) Panama cannot interpret the Convention or the Order of the Court to the detriment of the rights of the victims. If the State fails to comply with the decisions of the Court in its orders of November 2002 and June 2003, “not only is it disregarding its express acceptance of the competence of the Court, but it is also incurring in a new violation of the American Convention, contained in Article 68(1)”; h) The Court “has the authority to determine any aspect relating to its own competence and this is an obligation imposed by the American Convention itself, so that it may exercise its functions as the supreme body for monitoring human rights in the region”; i) “The Court, as the maximum and only court of justice for human rights in the region, cannot waive this authority and, as part of it, has the obligation to monitor compliance with its judgments. This is why in its judgments, the Court has always decided to monitor compliance with them