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D. Status of compliance with the recommendations of the IACHR
103.
Complete
compliance with the decisions of the Inter-American Commission is
essential for ensuring that human rights have full force in the OAS
member states, and for helping strengthen the Inter-American system
for the protection of human rights. With that in mind, the IACHR, in
this section, analyzes the status of compliance with the
recommendations in the reports adopted by the Commission in the last
two years.
104.
To that end,
the OAS General Assembly, through resolution AG/RES. 1890 (XXXII-O/02)
on Evaluation
of the Workings of the Inter-American System for the Protection and
Promotion of Human Rights with a View to its Improvement and
Strengthening, urged the member states to make their best efforts to
follow up on the recommendations of the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights (operative paragraph 3.c), and to continue to take
appropriate action in connection with the annual reports of the Court
and the Commission, in the framework of the Permanent Council and the
General Assembly of the Organization, and to study possible means to
address the state of compliance with the judgments of the Court and
the observance of the recommendations of the Commission
by the member states of the Organization (operative paragraph
3.d).
105.
Both the
Convention (Article 41) and the Statute of the Commission (Article 18)
explicitly grant the IACHR the authority to request information from
the member states and to produce such reports and recommendations as
it considers advisable. Specifically, Article 46 of the IACHR Rules of
Procedure, which took effect on May 1, 2001, provides the following:
1.
Once the Commission has published a report on a friendly
settlement or on the merits in which it has made recommendations, it
may adopt the follow-up measures it deems appropriate, such as
requesting information from the parties and holding hearings in order
to verify compliance with friendly settlement agreements and its
recommendations.
2.
The Commission shall report on progress in complying with those
agreements and recommendations as it deems appropriate.
106.
Similarly, the
General Assembly approved resolution AG/RES.
1894 (XXXII-O/02), Observations
and Recommendations on the Annual Report of the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights, invited the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights to consider the possibility of continuing to include in
its annual reports information on the follow-up of its recommendations
by the states, and to review, with a view to their improvement, the
criteria and indicators on that subject in the report for this year.
107.
In compliance
with its powers under the Convention and the Statute and with the
above-cited resolutions, and pursuant to Article 46 of its Rules of
Procedure, the IACHR requested information from the states on
compliance with the recommendations made in the reports published on
individual cases included in its annual reports for 2000 and 2001. The
Commission also decided to include on its web page (www.cidh.org) a
copy of the responses from the member states in cases where they
expressly requested that this be done.
108.
The table the
Commission is presenting includes the status of compliance with the
recommendations made by the IACHR in the cases that have been decided
and published in the last two years. The IACHR notes that compliance
with different recommendations is meant to be successive and not
immediate and that some recommendations require a reasonable time to
be fully implemented. The table, therefore, presents the current
status of compliance, which the Commission acknowledges as being a
dynamic process that may evolve continuously. From that perspective,
the Commission evaluates whether or not compliance with its
recommendations is complete and not whether it has been started. In
this section, the IACHR has tried to assemble the comments made by the
representatives of different member states upon presentation of the
Annual Report for 2001.
109.
The three
categories included in the table are the following:
- total
compliance (those cases in which the state has fully complied with all
the recommendations made by the IACHR. Having regard to the principles
of effectiveness and fully observed those recommendations where the
state has begun and satisfactorily completed the procedures for
compliance);
- partial
compliance (those cases in which the state has partially observed the
recommendations made by the IACHR either by having complied with only
one or some of them or through incomplete compliance with all of
them);
- compliance
pending (those cases in which the IACHR considers that there has been
no compliance with the recommendations because no steps have been
taken in that direction; because the state has explicitly indicated
that it will not comply with the recommendations made; or because the
state has not reported to the IACHR and the Commission has no
information from other sources that would suggest otherwise).
Case
11.307 – Report Nº 103/01, María Merciadri de Morini (Argentina)
110. Report Nº 103/01 was approved by the Commission on October 11, 2001 to report on the friendly settlement reached with respect to a petition challenging the application of Law 24.012 (the “Quota Act”) and its i |
