SEPARATE OPINION OF JUDGE DE ROUX RENGIFO On the occasion of this judgment, I wish to make a general observation concerning the issue of the fair determination of compensation for non-pecuniary damage. First, I would like to recall that in the judgment to which this opinion refers, the Court established a very relevant distinction between two types of non-pecuniary damage: on the one hand, “the sufferings and distress caused to the direct victims and their next of kin” and, on the other, “the impairment of values that are highly significant to them [, which] cannot be assessed in financial terms”. I would have preferred to Court to use a more general expression than that of nonpecuniary damage (daño moral); for example, that of non-material damage (daño immaterial), to allude to those negative changes in a person’s situation that are not of a financial or patrimonial nature. In that case, it could have reserved the expression non-pecuniary damage, as comparative law on responsibility has been doing, to refer exclusively to the suffering and grief caused by the injurious facts to the direct victims and their next of kin. But it is not worth giving too much significance to this matter, which appears to be merely a matter of terminology. In this and other judgments, the Court has said that non-pecuniary damage cannot be repaired by the payment of a monetary equivalent; in other words, it cannot be measured and, thus, cannot be compensated exactly, in monetary terms. Consequently, it is only viable to make reparation for such damages by granting compensation, which is established by “applying judicial discretion and the principle of equity.” Accordingly, when compensation is defined in pecuniary terms, as the Court usually does – in other words, when a State is condemned to pay a sum of money to compensate a non-pecuniary damage – the intention is not that this payment should fill a vacuum of the same nature and size as that generated by the effects of the damaging fact. What is being sought, modestly but sensibly, is to palliate and alleviate such effects, insofar as possible, in the awareness that they belong to a type of circumstance that eludes any precise monetary assessment. In this matter, as in many others, “the best is the enemy of the good.” It is laudable to explicitly recognize that the victims of human rights violations suffer affective and emotional damages and, in this and other ways, see assets and values violated that cannot be fully assessed in monetary terms. But if the courts send them away empty-handed, because they do not wish to reduce such assets and values of a superior nature to a vulgar, pecuniary assessment, in practical terms, they are merely showing evidence of insensitivity in the face of the suffering caused to the victims by the situation in which they find themselves owing to the damaging facts. Fortunately, the Inter-American Court has not proceeded in this way, either in the Street Children case or in other similar cases. Thus, when the Court establishes, in fairness, the monetary compensation for a nonpecuniary damage, it tries to build a bridge between situations and values of a nonmaterial nature and sums of money or assets that may be directly assessed in money. It is clear that this is a complex intellectual operation because, when making an arbitrary decision in the matter, judges cannot shield themselves behind