75 governments had become parties to the criminal cases that ended in their conviction for terrorist crimes. Their contention was that the system whereby judges are promoted in Chile, particularly promotions from the oral criminal trial court to the appellate court, depends on the appointments made by the President of the Republic. They therefore argue that the fact that government representatives became accusers in their trial before the Angol oral criminal trial court, affected that court’s independence. 279. The Commission deems that the information supplied by the petitioners is not sufficient for an in-depth analysis of a possible violation of the right to an independent judge. Such an analysis would require detailed information on the domestic laws, appointment and promotion procedures, and the functional and dependency relationships among the various authorities in question. The information the Commission has available is not sufficient to rule one way or the other on this argument. 4.3 The right to an impartial judge or tribunal 280. The impartiality of the court, for its part, denotes absence of prejudice or bias in the mind of the judge or the court, both from the subjective and objective perspective. It also means that sufficient guarantees are there to avoid any legitimate doubt in this regard; in other words, that the judges are not biased for or against a 261 particular case and they cannot be reasonably perceived to be so. In the words of the Human Rights Committee, The impartiality of the court and the publicity of proceedings are important aspects of the right to a fair trial within the meaning of article 14, paragraph 1. “Impartiality” of the court implies that judges must not harbor preconceptions about the matter put before them, and that they must not act in ways that promote the interests of one of the parties.262 Where the grounds for disqualification of a judge are laid down by law, it is incumbent upon the court to consider ex officio these grounds and to replace members of the court falling under the disqualification criteria. A trial flawed by the participation of a judge who, under domestic statutes, should have been disqualified cannot normally be considered to be fair or impartial within the meaning of article 14. 263 281. Petitioners Pascual Pichún and Aniceto Norín allege that Article 8(1) of the American Convention, which recognizes the right to an impartial judge, was violated by the fact that the oral criminal trial court took it as a ‘public and notorious fact’ that violent, illegal organizations existed and operated in Region IX. In their view, an impartial court would not have taken these facts as proven by simply branding them as “public and notorious”. Petitioners Juan Patricio Marileo Saravia, Florencio Jaime Marileo Saravia, Patricia Roxana Troncoso Robles, José Benicio Huenchunao Mariñán and Juan Ciríaco Millacheo Licán consider that their right to be tried by an impartial court was violated by the fact that an excerpt from the verdict of conviction that the oral criminal trial court delivered in their case is, language-wise, identical to another conviction that the same court delivered in another criminal case also involving members of the Mapuche indigenous community. 282. Earlier in this report, the IACHR addressed the violation of the American Convention by virtue of the reference to the context in Region IX as one of the grounds for classifying the conduct under investigation as terrorist action and attributing individual criminal responsibility to the petitioners on that basis. 283. The Commission also considers that these measures show that the judges on the oral criminal trial court came to this case with preconceived notions about the law and order situation associated with the so-called “Mapuche conflict,” biases that caused them to take as proven fact that Region IX was the scene of a series of violent activities and that the events in the case the court was 261 IACHR, Case 11.139, Report No. 57/96, William Andrews (United States), Annual Report IACHR 1997, paragraphs 159-161. See also European Court of Human Rights, Case of Findlay v. United Kingdom, February 25, 1997, paragraph 73. IACHR, Report on Terrorism and Human Rights, OEA/SER.L/V/II.116, Doc. 5 rev. 1, corr., October 22, 2002, paragraph 229. 262 Communication No. 387/1989, Karttunen v. Finland, paragraph 7.2. 263 Communication No. 387/1989, Karttunen v. Finland, paragraph 7.2.