This text seeks to illustrate one of the situations which, in the authors’ view, currently involves a procedural disadvantage for the users of the Inter-American Human Rights System: the accumulation of the procedural stages of individual petitions and contentious cases, by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, respectively. The authors attempt to demonstrate that this practice sometimes threatens the guarantees of those involved in the aforementioned processes.
Therefore, there will be a description of the practice of the accumulation phenomenon in the Inter-American Human Rights System (II). Later on, the authors will explain the States inability to recognize some kind of responsibility and, at the same time, fill preliminary objections, as an example of violation of guarantees (III). Finally, the authors will propose two procedural alternatives to solve the presented situation (IV).