9 the concretization of justice for crimes of such seriousness, self-amnesties infringe. As far as they hinder justice from its execution for crimes of such seriousness, self-amnesties infringe jus cogens. (...) Finally, self-amnesties violate the rights to truth and justice, they cruelly disregard the terrible suffering of the victims, hinder the right to proper reparations. Their perverse effects, in my opinion permeate the whole social tissue, with the resulting loss in the faith for human justice and real values, and a perverse distortion of the State purposes. Originally created for the realization of common welfare, the State boils down to an entity which exterminates members from segments of its own population (the most precious element of the State itself, its human substratum) before the most absolute impunity. From an entity created for the concretization of common welfare, it turns into an entity responsible for truly criminal practices, for undeniable State crimes" (paras. 7, 10 and 21). 32. Judgments of this Court in the cases of Barrios Altos (2001), Almonacid (2006), and La Cantuta (2006), constitute a decisive contribution of this Court towards the end of selfamnesties and the prevalence of the Law. I perfectly remember that, in the public hearing of September 29, 2006 in this case of La Cantuta, held in the Court´s house in San José de Costa Rica (my last public hearing as Incumbent Judge of this Court), the common concern, expressed by both the Inter-American Commission and by the counsel of the victims and their next of kin, as I understood it, was in the sense to guarantee the due remedies, among which the guarantee of non-repetition of injurious facts, -although their arguments regarding self-amnesty laws have not been converging or coincident. 33. The victims and their next of kin counsel (interventions of Ms. Viviana Krsticevic and Ms. María Clara Galvis, of CEJIL) firmly held that what was set forth by the Court in the Judgment of Barrios Altos was already directly incorporated in the domestic Peruvian legal system, and was convalidated by the constant practice of the Peruvian Judicial Power since then (excluding the military jurisdiction, the decisions of which lack “jurisdictional” characteristics). Also, the Inter-American Commission Delegate (Commissioner Paolo Carozza), lucidly and correctly stated that the amnesty laws of the Fujimori regime had to be abolished (term used by this Court in the Judgment of Barrios Altos) so as to make it clear that they never had validity regarding the American Convention, being contrary to the jus cogens (cf. infra). 34. Also, an equally lucid and substantial amicus curiae submitted by the Institute of Legal Defense -Instituto de Defensa Legal (IDL)- with offices in Lima, Peru, urged the Court to declare self-amnesty laws No. 26479 and No. 26492 inexistent (pp. 4 and 40), remarking that the international courts jurisprudence, among which that of the Inter-American Convention, has immediate effects, direct application and is binding, thus incorporating “directly in the Peruvian corpus juris" (p. 30). The said amicus curiae of the IDL added that those self-amnesty laws “are inexistent,” as they “exceeded the intangible limit (constitutional guarantee of human rights”, and were placed “in an extralegal and extraconstitutional scope” (p. 38). The amicus curiae of the IDL concluded that "there is a repeated, consistent and uniform practice of the Peruvian Attorney General Office and the Peruvian Judicial Power in the sense that such self-amnesty laws lack legal effects and do not constitute an obstacle for starting the investigations, prosecution and punishment of human rights infringers; there is a set of decisions issued by the Constitutional Court understanding that, within the domestic scope and according to the text of the Peruvian Constitution, the procedural obstacles hindering the punishment of human rights violations are inadmissible, and that the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Human Rights Court is of direct application in the domestic legal system (...). For the same reasons, it is not necessary that the Peruvian State adopts any additional provisions to those already assumed, in the domestic law, to guarantee the lack of legal effects of self-amnesty laws in an effective way. (...) In the particular case of the Peruvian self-amnesty laws, it is worth mentioning that, considering their non-existing condition, they are inefficient from their origin (as they were not part of the domestic legal system they produced no legal effect whatsoever)” (p. 39).