48 103. In light of the provisions of the Constitution of Peru, the rulings of the Peruvian Constitutional Court, Article 29(b) of the Convention – which prohibits a restrictive interpretation of rights – and a progressively developing interpretation of international instruments that protect human rights, this Court considers that, from the time that Carlos Torres Benvenuto, Javier Mujica Ruiz-Huidobro, Guillermo Álvarez Hernández, Maximiliano Gamarra Ferreyra and Reymert Bartra Vásquez paid their contributions to the pension fund regulated by Decree Law No. 20530, ceased to work for the SBS, and opted for the retirement regime set forth in this decree law, they acquired the right to their pensions being regulated by the terms and conditions established in this decree law and its related norms. In other words, the pensioners acquired a right to property related to the patrimonial effects of the right to a pension, in accordance with Decree Law No. 20530 and as established in Article 21 of the American Convention150. 104. b) Second Point. In accordance with the foregoing, it has been established that the alleged victims have an acquired right to the payment of a pension and, more precisely, to a pension, the amount of which is equalized with the salary received by the persons who are performing the same or similar tasks to those that the beneficiary of the pension exercised at the time he retired from the position. Therefore, the dispute involves another point. The persons who perform the same or similar tasks to those that the five pensioners exercised may be subject to two different regimes, the public sector regime and the private sector regime, and their salaries vary, according to whether they are subject to one or the other, because the salary under the latter regime is considerably higher than the salary under the former. Consequently, the provision according to which the five pensioners will receive a pension equivalent to the salary of the current personnel involves an ambiguity that must be clarified in order to define the content and scope of the acquired right to the pension. 105. In this respect, it is pertinent to mention Act No. 23495 entitled “Progressive equalization of the pensions of retirees and those who cease working for the Public Administration and who are not subject to the Social Insurance Regime or other Special Regimes.” Article 1 of this act establishes that: The pensions of those who stop working after more than 20 years’ service and of those who retire from the Public Administration, who are not subject to the Social Insurance Regime or other special regimes, will be progressively equalized with the salaries of active public servants in the respective categories... 106. The Commission and the representatives of the alleged victims and their next of kin consider that the calculation of the amount of the pension to which the five pensioners have a right should be made on the basis of the salary of the active SBS official occupying the same or an equivalent position to the one the pensioner occupied at the time of his retirement. The State affirms that the calculation should be made by equalizing with the salary of an active employee in the same category and labor regime (public sector) as that of the alleged victims when they took their retirement. The State maintains that equalizing the pension on the basis of the 150 The Court has defined “property” (Ivcher Bronstein case. Judgment of February 6, 2001. Series C No. 74, para. 122) as “those material objects that may be appropriated, and also any right that may form part of a person’s patrimony; this concept includes all movable and immovable property, corporal and incorporeal elements, and any other intangible object of any value”. Also, cf. Eur. Court H.R., Case of Gaygusuz v. Austria, Judgment of 16 September 1996, Merits and just satisfaction, paras. 39, 41.