On April 13, 2002, a group of military personnel from the Casa Militar barracks held Eduardo Sapene Granier at RCTV headquarters during an “assault” by the Bolivarian circles on RCTV. On July 31, 2002, in the immediate surroundings of the Supreme Court of Justice, reporters Isnardo Bravo, Wilmer Marcano; Winston Gutiérrez were verbally attacked (e.g. “we’re going to kill you”), etc. The two RCTV vehicles that were parked in the area were attacked, first by scratching the cars, then breaking their windows and puncturing all eight tires, while insults were hurled at the reporters and technical personnel in the vehicles. In the afternoon of that same day, the second RCTV vehicle was set on fire when a teargas bomb exploded inside. 40. The petitioners stated that they had reported all the attacks they had endured to the Venezuelan Attorney General’s Office, backed by audiovisual evidence, digital photos, and tapes, which presumably identify one of the aggressors as an alleged active member of the Bolivarian Circles. The petitioners hold the Venezuelan State internationally responsible for the “threats, intimidation, and attacks on reporters and directors of the RCTV (…) by the Bolivarian Circles,” who “acting directly or indirectly on behalf of the State, with its prompting, support, encouragement, tolerance, or its general acquiescence, violate the human rights internationally (…) established by the Convention.” 2 41. The petitioners allege that there is a connection between the attacks they reported and the hostile statements against the media, especially RCTV and its management, by the President of the Republic Hugo Chávez Frías and other senior government officials. 42. The petitioners allege that the continued attacks they reported constitute risks to their physical, moral, and mental integrity, in violation of Article 5 of the American Convention. They add that this defenselessness has affected their work in the media by exposing them to continuous physical aggression, as well as pain and suffering in the face of insults and verbal abuse from senior government officials and individuals, who are protected by the State through its failure to act to condemn, investigate, or punish said abuse. The petitioners claim that as reporters, cameramen, and camera assistants working the streets, they fear for their lives and personal integrity, and that sometimes they cannot use network identification, logos, or uniforms or have to wear bulletproof vests and gas masks provided by the network. 43. They add that the repeated, continual, and systematic acts of verbal abuse of the petitioners by the State, from the highest levels of Government or from groups linked to the Government, has resulted in a pattern of harassment regarding the right to information and expression, which constitutes a violation of Article 13 of the American Convention. 44. With respect to exhaustion of domestic remedies, the petitioners indicate that they have physical access to the documents of the case filed with the Attorney General’s Office, the judicial police, and the criminal courts of first instance in charge of oversight. They also report that they have been able to submit documents to the public prosecutor’s office. However, they state that the action of the Attorney General’s Office, the only authority that may take criminal action in crimes committed by the government3, has been limited to taking declarations from 2 The petition includes the official Web page of the Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, which gives the general guidelines and requirements for forming a Bolivarian Circle. The page also indicated that “the supreme leader of the Bolivarian Circles is the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela” and that “the national and international headquarters for the records of the Bolivarian Circles will be the Miraflores Palace.” See www.venezuela.gov.ve. Last visited on January 29, 2004. 3 The Cassation Division of the Supreme Court of Justice, in Judgment No. 0013 presented by Magistrate Blanca Rosa Mármol de León, established the doctrine of victims’ rights as follows: Article 117, applying the ejusdem generis rule to victims’ rights, establishes that any person considered a victim in accordance with the provisions of the Organic Code of Criminal Procedure, even if said person is not a complainant, may, upon request, exercise in criminal procedures various rights established in the eight points of that rule, of which point 8 in particular states that victims may contest a stay or acquittal, even if they are not parties to the action, provided that the public prosecutor in the Attorney General’s Office files an appeal. The foregoing shows that in the 8