4 14. Furthermore, always recalling the status of the individual as a subject of international human rights law (and, in my opinion, of public international law also), I maintain that Article 61(1) of the Convention should, significantly, be amended as follows: "The State Parties, the Commission and the alleged victims shall have the right to submit a case to the Court.”12 And, following the same line of thought, I would like to add in this separate opinion, the supplementary proposal to the effect that Article 63(2) of the American Convention should, in an equally significant manner, be amended as follows: "In cases of extreme gravity and urgency, and when necessary to avoid irreparable damage to persons, the Court shall adopt such provisional measures as it deems pertinent in matters it has under consideration. With respect to a case not yet submitted to its consideration, it may act at the request of the Commission or of the alleged potential victims.” 15. In the protection mechanism of the American Convention, the right of individual petition will attain its maximum expression when it can be exercised by the petitioners directly before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Hence this proposal to amend Article 61(1) of the Convention, extended also to Article 63(2), in certain circumstances, with regard to provisional protection measures. I consider that this is fully justified, particularly in the case of alleged situations of extreme gravity and urgency, with the alleged probability of irreparable damage to persons. Antônio Augusto Cançado Trindade Judge Pablo Saavedra Alessandri Secretary eliminated so that the first sentence of the article reads “The decisions, judgments and opinions of he Court shall be notified to the parties in writing”; and in Article 28, the words “as a party” should also be eliminated. . In its actual and original wording, Article 61(1) of the American Convention establishes that only the States Parties and the Commission shall have the right to “submit a case” to the Court. But the Convention, when referring to reparations, also refers to “the injured party” (Article 63(1)), i.e., the victims and not the Commission. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the historical reasons that led to denying this locus standi to the victims has been overcome; in the European and interAmerican human rights systems, practice revealed the inadequacies, shortcomings and biases of the paternalist mechanism of the Commission’s intermediation between the individual and the Court. 12