108 220. Concerning the violation of Article 7 of the American Convention in relation to Article 1(1) thereof, the representatives alleged that: a) the State violated the right to personal liberty and security, to the detriment of the three thousand seven hundred forty-four children who were interned at the Center in the period from August 14, 1996 to July 25, 2001, and those who were transferred to adult prisons; b) under the Paraguayan law in effect at the time of the events herein denounced, the domestic courts had sweeping authority to order preventive detention, an authority that the courts exercised as a generalized, abusive and arbitrary practice; c) internationally accepted principles for the incarceration of juveniles were violated, as the State provided no alternatives to imprisonment in the case of minors in conflict with the law. The primary purpose of the sentence was not to educate the juvenile and reincorporate him into society; d) the Minor’s Code made no provision for the subsidiarity principle and did not provide that deprivation of liberty as a preventive measure was to be used only in exceptional cases; it left that decision entirely to the judge’s discretion; e) the Articles added to the Code of Criminal Procedure on the subject of preventive detention (which entered into force in July 1999) do make provision for the subsidiarity principle and the principle of ultima ratio. The same cannot be said, however, of the earlier Code of Criminal Procedure, which authorized preventive detention in all those cases in which there was prima facie evidence of the commission of a crime and evidence to suggest that the accused was involved. These standards do not comport with the international standards on this subject; f) even when a detention is done in accordance with the existing law, it may still be arbitrary if it is unreasonable, unforeseeable or disproportionate; g) the endless violence that the State forced upon the children interned at the Center constituted systematic violations of human rights contrary to the international standards for the protection of children. The presence of a generalized practice has one important consequence, which is to reverse the burden of proving that these conditions applied to each and every children; and h) the court system made generalized, abusive and arbitrary use of preventive detention; the criminal laws applied did not take the accused’ status as a child into account; juveniles’ cases experienced unwarranted delays before being decided, and the legal counsel provided to the inmates was unsatisfactory. Pleadings of the State 221. Concerning Article 7 of the Convention, the State alleged that: a) the allegation of violation of Article 7 was not properly substantiated and proven;