opportunities to present all their arguments and evidence before the Court; b) they guarantee compliance with the principle of having the presence of both parties to an action,16 and therefore the parties feel, themselves, satisfied that all their evidence has been produced before the Court for the determination of the facts, and all their arguments have been presented before the Court for its evaluation of what occurred; and c) they constitute, for the victims, as previously stated, a form of reparation, and for them one of the most important. 33. To the contrary of what is underlying the decision of the majority of the Court regarding the specific matters in the present case, the doubts that have to be clarified, both juridical and factual, are not only the Judges’ doubts, but also – and mainly – the parties’ doubts. And, for this purpose, public hearings are not only more appropriate but also necessary. Therefore, in the course of the present proceedings of Interpretation of the Judgment, I allowed myself to address a letter to the Secretariat of the Court, on August 10, 2007, recommending that a public hearing be held17 in relation to the requests – presented by all the procedural parties participating in the present case of the Castro Castro Prison –of Interpretation of the Judgment, but the majority of the Tribunal preferred to do without said hearing. 34. The present case of the Castro Castro Prison is paradigmatic in what refers to the bad conditions of detention and the violent attack against defenseless people, who were under the State’s custody. The petitioners presented arguments better substantiated than those of the Inter-American Commission itself (v.g., regarding the matter of the principle of proportionality), in a demonstration that the victims, as subjects of International Law, are in better conditions of presenting their case before a tribunal such as the Inter-American Court than any intermediary presumably acting on their behalf. In reference to the international subjectivity of groups of individuals, the case of the Moiwana Community versus Suriname (Judgment on merits of 06.15.2005) presents an appropriate illustration of a case of rights of the people.18 . For a recent general study, cf., [Various Authors,] Le principe du contradictoire devant les juridictions internationales (eds. H. Ruiz Fabri and J.-M. Sorel), Paris, Pédone, 2004, pp. 1-195. 16 . 17 IACHR, document CDH-11.015/288, pp. 1-2 (internal circulation). . And, specifically, on the legal subjectivity of people within international law. For example, the Court recalled, in its Judgment, that six Maroons communities in Suriname, more than two centuries before it became an independent State, celebrated peace treaties with the Dutch colonial authorities (the N'djukas in 1760), later renovated, thus obtaining their freedom from slavery (paras. 83(1) and (2)). In my Concurring Opinion in said case of the Moiwana Community, I considered that "the Maroons, - the N'djuka in particular, - regard these treaties as still valid and authoritatives in the relations with the successor State, Suriname. This means that those peoples exercised their attributes of legal persons in international law, well before the territory where they lived acquired statehood. This reinforces the thesis which I have always supported, namely, that the State are not, and have never been, the sole and exclusive subjects of international law" (para. 6). And I added: "Human beings, individually and collectively, have emerged as subjects of international law. The rights protected disclose an individual and a collective or social dimensions, but it is the human beings, members of such minorities or collectivities, who are, ultimately, the titulaires of those rights" (para. 10). As holders of rights, they can present their own arguments before a tribunal such as the Inter-American Court with full freedom of expression (para. 12). – Actually, in a more distant past, treaties were celebrated between people and human societies with a minimum level of organization, much before the emergency of the Westphalian inter-state order in the XVII century, which proves that, both international juridical capacity, and the capacity to celebrate treaties 18

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