71 of the law or failure to apply the law, or the misapplication of the provisions of the law that determined the outcome of the judgment, and b) material: an appeal must go forward when an irreversible error has occurred, when the accused has not enjoyed a proper defense, or when rules of evidence assessment are violated, provided those violations have caused the rules of evidence to be misapplied or not applied at all; k) international case law has tended to regard remedies that do not permit a review of the facts and of the law applied, to be contrary to international human rights law; and l) in attempting to refute the violation of Article 8(1) of the Convention, the State is admitting that the writ of cassation is only permissible in matters of procedure; therefore, on cassation, the Third Chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court did not have an opportunity to review the facts of the criminal case against Mr. Mauricio Herrera Ulloa. 137(3) With regard to the right to a hearing by an impartial judge or tribunal (Article 8(1) of the Convention), the representatives argued that: a) there was very little room for judicial impartiality, as the justices who had issued the final judgment had already advanced their views on the subject less than two years before the final ruling; b) in the wake of the nullification ordered by the Third Chamber of the Costa Rican Supreme Court, the second judgment delivered by the court of first instance adhered to the criterion established by the Third Chamber, “so that when the same justices took up the case for a second time on cassation, they confined themselves to checking to make certain that the position they had already taken on the facts in the very same case had been effectively applied”; and c) if judges are to be impartial, they must not be predisposed or biased; therefore, the justices who had nullified the first conviction should never have been the judges to hear the writ of cassation. 137(4) With regard to the right to be presumed innocent (Article 8(2) of the American Convention), the representatives argued that: a) in convicting Mr. Herrera Ulloa, the Costa Rican courts maintained that in a “case involving the crime of publishing insults […], the defendant’s mens rea need not be proved. This is also true in cases involving criminal defamation. In other words, the intent to harm another person’s honor need not be proved.” The party filing the criminal complaint did not have to prove the defendant’s criminal intent; instead, it was the defendant who was required to prove the veracity of the stories reported in the European press. The doctrine of exceptio veritatis implies a kind of presumption of guilt, or at the very least reverses the burden of proof to the journalist’s disadvantage. In fact, it should be the party making the charge that is required to prove the defendant’s bad faith or mens rea; a defendant should not be required to prove negatives, i.e., that he did not act with malicious intent or with reckless disregard of the truth or with knowledge that the facts reported were false;