65 competence of the Court on March 26, 1993, the Court will compute the duration of the proceedings as of that date. From said date until the date of the instant Judgment, 13 years have elapsed without any final solution having been given to the claim of the Sawhoyamaxa Community members. 96. Moreover, the Court notes that the delay in the administrative proceedings under analysis in the instant Judgment is the result of state authorities systematically deferring action. In fact, since March 26, 1993, date on which Paraguay recognized the contentious competence of the Court, until now, no significant steps have been taken in the administrative proceedings analyzed. INDI and IBR have just sent the case file to each other and recurrently requested the owners of the lands claimed by the Community to make offers “with respect to the affected piece of land,” without getting any positive answer thereto, for the IBR finally to declare, on June 15, 1999, that it had no competence to decide whether or not to condemn the lands and to hand over the responsibility to the INDI (supra para. 73(44), an agency which, according to the case file kept in this Court, has taken no action since July 1999. 97. In view of the foregoing, and considering that in the above mentioned Case of the Indigenous Community Yakye Axa v. Paraguay, the Court declared that the term of 11 years and eight months incurred in the land claim proceedings was in itself a violation of the right to a fair trial of the members of said Community,178 it declares that the term of 13 years incurred in the proceedings related to the instant case may hardly be considered reasonable. 98. Thus, the Court considers that the action taken by state authorities in the land claim administrative proceedings fail to conform to the reasonable time principle. * 99. Furthermore, the State asserted that the representatives had not used the administrative law proceedings to challenge the status of rationally exploited the lands were given and that the interested parties had failed to institute ordinary judicial proceedings to determine whether the right to ancestral communal property of the land prevailed over the right to its private ownership. 100. In this regard, the Court considers that the argument of the State relates to the exhaustion of domestic remedies; consequently, according to the invariable case law of this Court, it is not feasible that at this stage of the proceedings to discuss issues that should have been addressed in previous stages in which the tacit waiver of the State´s opportunity to object the lack of exhaustion of domestic remedies was operative.179 Therefore, the Court takes into account that, at the initial stages of the proceedings before the Commission, the State failed to allege that ordinary and administrative law remedies had not been exhausted; on the contrary, the State advocated in furtherance of the requests for condemnation before the National 178 179 Cf. Case of the Indigenous Community Yakye Axa, supra note 1, paras. 85-87. Case of the Indigenous Community Yakye Axa, supra note 1, para. 91 and cf. Case of AcevedoJaramillo et al, supra note 3, para. 124; Case of García-Asto and Ramírez-Rojas, supra note 4, paras. 49 and 50, and Case of of the Serrano-Cruz sisters v. El Salvador. Preliminary Objections. Judgment of November 23, 2004. Series C No. 118, para. 135.

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