In the Inter-American System, the purpose of precautionary measures is to prevent irreparable harm to persons or to preserve the subject matter of the proceedings in connection with pending litigation. Therefore, their adoption does not require a case pending before the Commission, nor do they have to join the claim of a human rights violation. Although the precautionary measures are not explicitly mentioned in the American Convention or statute, as I mentioned before, these measures have been institutionalized for decades through Rules of Procedure of the Commission.22 Under Article 25 of the Rules of Procedure of the Commission, in serious and urgent situations the Commission may, on its own initiative or the initiative of a party, request that a state adopt precautionary measures. After doing a very quick analysis of the measures, we found that of the 771 measures adopted by the Commission from 1994 to 2012, 665 measures dealt with the right to life, along with other rights. Six hundred thirty-four measures dealt with life and humane treatment. Five hundred eighty-two dealt with personal integrity, along with rights other than the right to life. Eightythree measures dealt with the right to life alone. Only seven measures dealt with humane treatment alone—not related to the right to life or other rights under the American Convention. Therefore, the great majority of the precautionary measures adopted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights have focused on these non-derogable core rights established both in the Declaration and the American Convention. If protections are provided by the state as a result of an order issued by the Inter-American Commission, these may be due to its own motion or at a request of a party. Taking into consideration the special circumstances existing in several states of the Americas, the Commission has adopted precautionary measures to protect persons on an individual and collective basis. In this sense, beneficiaries of precautionary measures have been, among others, human rights defenders, persons in detention—some of whom have been sentenced to capital punishment or are being kept in deplorable health conditions—persons being harassed in the context of judicial procedures, persons with health problems, children, and entire communities of indigenous peoples. We have numbers for other rights related to, for example, freedom of expression with 25 measures; right to health with 26 measures; equality with fifteen measures; personal safety with thirteen measures; and liberty with eight measures. You will see that there is a clear focus of the Commission on these particular rights, even though the normative framework of the Commission is very broad—not only right to life, equality, and personal integrity, but many other rights. The Commission has been very deliberate and careful in using these powers on these types of rights, dispelling some conceptions that the Commission has been very liberal in dispensing precautionary measures in all sorts of situations, particularly in the framework of the Belo Monte case.23 Study on the Commission’s Use of Precautionary Measures Another important finding that illustrates the scope and where the Commission focuses its measures are the number of precautionary measures issued by country. Which countries receive the most precautionary measures? In the last decade, Colombia had the most with 173 measures. Then comes Guatemala, with 97 measures, then Mexico with 75, and—I would say surprisingly for some and not for others—the United States is fourth, with 72 precautionary measures. As you can imagine, these entail issues of non-refoulement and issues related to the death penalty. Behind each one of these situations, there are grim realities that stem from armed conflict, discrimination, poverty, corruption, precarious prison conditions, and impunity, which unfortunately still exist in the Americas. On this basis, with a colleague in the University of Ghent in Belgium, we studied all of the measures that have been adopted by the Inter-American Commission since they first adopted this power in the regulations in the 1980s; we ended up with a collection of 771 precautionary measures. Then we studied how the Commission dealt with petitions regarding different countries—the Americas is composed of a very diverse set of countries, some of which have gross, systematic violations of human rights, others with established democracies—to understand the scope of application of the precautionary measures of the Commission and how they have been used in its history. There is very little information about the implementation of the measures. We only found some references, particularly dealing with the death penalty. Of the death penalty cases, there were only a few reported—139 cases reported on the death penalty, and only 45 of those cases were followed up in these reports. And of those 45 death penalty cases, there was some sort of compliance with the measures only in half of them. The [United States] complied with seven cases with interim measures of the Commission. Other countries have complied with precautionary measures—half of them have been complied with in some way or another, partly on the basis of the report regarding death penalty cases. We intend to release this article in two or three months, and hopefully it will increase understanding of the Commission’s measures, as opposed to the practice of the provisional measures of the Court, given that there is much more information on these. The Commission can issue measures regarding any right recognized by the Inter-American instruments for which the individual complaint procedure is available, that is the basic prerequisite. This very broad subject matter jurisdiction is, however, limited by notions that were mentioned before—gravity, urgency and irreparability of a particular situation, and on those bases it has narrowed its measures to specific situations and specific rights. The Value of Precautionary Measures Finally, I would like to highlight a couple more issues. First is the importance of precautionary measures for the protection of the most basic rights. The Commission has been very deliberate in opening its measures not only for situations that have been dealt with in cases, as I mentioned, but beyond that. You can 16