19. The petitioners claim that the Ecuadorian State has violated the fundamental individual and collective rights of members of the Sarayaku indigenous community through the direct actions of State agents supporting the incursion of an oil company onto Sarayaku ancestral lands without consultation, persecuting Sarayaku leaders, and denying judicial protection and due process to the Sarayaku community. They further claim that the State is responsible, by omission, for allowing, with its consent, the systematic violation of the fundamental rights of the Sarayaku community by an oil company and its employees. 20. In light of the foregoing, the petitioners claim that the Ecuadorian state has violated, to the detriment of the Sarayaku indigenous community and its members, the following rights enshrined in the American Convention: the right to private property, judicial protection, judicial guarantees, freedom of movement, personal integrity, personal liberty, life, freedom of association, political participation, freedom of expression, recognition of juridical personality, freedom of conscience and religion, rights of the child, equality before the law, and health and culture, the latter in conjunction with Articles XI and XIII of the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. They further allege that the State has violated its general obligations to respect and ensure the aforementioned rights (Article 1(1)) and to adopt provisions of domestic law to make them effective (Article 2), both under the American Convention. 21. The petitioners indicate that the Kichwa people of Sarayaku are located in the Amazonian province of Pastaza, in the central southern portion of the Amazon region of the Republic of Ecuador and that this is one of the historic settlements of the Kichwa indigenous people, 2 which holds approximately 1,200 members. It is organized in the Association of the Kichwa People of Sarayaku (Tayja Saruta),3 which includes the population centers of Shiguacoca, Chontayaku, Sarayakillo, Cali Cali, Teresa Mama, Llanchama, Sarayaku Centro, and its ancestral lands, comprising 135,000 hectares, which are part of the 254,625 hectares shared with the Kichwa people of Boberas, thus occupying nearly 43% of the area of the Bobonaza River basin. The Ecuadorian State legally recognized this territory in 1992 by granting a title of territorial ownership.4 22. In 1996, the Ecuadorian State signed a partnership contract with the Argentine company called the Compañía General de Combustible (hereinafter the “CGC” or the “oil company”), for oil exploration and exploitation on 200,000 hectares in the Pastaza province located in an area known as “Block 23” [Bloque 23]. Sixty-five percent of this block consists of the legal ancestral lands of the Sarayaku indigenous community. The petitioners claim that the participation contract between the State and the oil company was entered into without respect for the regulatory, constitutional, and conventional procedures set forth in domestic and international law. Moreover, this was done without consultation of the Sarayaku indigenous community and did not fulfill the requirement of obtaining the community’s free and informed consent in order to carry out extractive activities on its territory. 23. The petitioners assert that, although the exploration phase was supposed to start in 1997 according to the contract, the CGC did not launch this phase of seismic prospecting until November 2002, four years after the new Ecuadorian Political Constitution took effect, and three years after Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries of the International Labor Organization (hereinafter “ILO Convention 169”) entered into force. The petitioners assert that, under the new Political Constitution and ILO Convention 169, it was incumbent upon the State to take all necessary measures to respect and ensure the rights of 2 The Kichwa nationality in the province of Pastaza is made up of 136 communities or centers, organized into 14 associations representing a total population of 25,000 inhabitants. 3 The political organization of the indigenous peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon includes the following levels: The Centers, corresponding to the traditional authorities known as kurakas; the associations, which encompass different centers and represent a people; federations, which comprise various associations and which, in the case of Pastaza, is the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza (OPIP); the confederations, which bring together federations at the regional and national levels -- they are the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE), and the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE). 4 The indigenous peoples living in the province of Pastaza occupy 91.8% of the territory, of which the Kichwa ancestrally possess 60.02%, the Huaroni and Achuar possess 13.87% and 10.37% respectively, and the Zapara and Shiwiar possess 15.74%. 4