87 a) the State failed to comply with its duty to respect and ensure the right to humane treatment in the case of the three thousand seven hundred fortyfour children detained at the Center in the period from August 14, 1996 to July 25, 2001, their next of kin, the thirty-eight children who were either burned or otherwise injured in the successive fires at the Center, and the children who were transferred to adult prisons; b) the endless violence to which the State subjected the children at the Center was a pattern of systematic human rights violations contrary to the international standards for the protection of children; as a consequence, the burden of proving whether any of these conditions applied to all the inmates is reversed; c) the conditions of detention at the Center included, inter alia: overpopulation; overcrowding; commingling of inmates awaiting or standing trial with those already convicted; lack of sanitary conditions; poor diet; lack of proper medical, dental and psychological care; lack of adequate education programs; lack of recreation, lack of fire safety and prevention measures; too few and poorly trained guards; no control of physical and mental violence; inhumane treatment and torture, which included the existence of a torture chamber and solitary confinement cell; lack of disciplinary and criminal investigation of cases of mistreatment and torture, with the result that such cases went unpunished; and transfer of children to adult prisons as a form of punishment or because of lack of space; d) the children who were transferred to adult penal institutions endured conditions that were even worse than those at the Center: the overcrowding was worse; they had neither ventilation nor natural light; they were forced to urinate and defecate on the floor and were tortured; and e) the State violated the mental integrity of the alleged victims’ next of kin because of the fear, suffering and anxiety they suffered over the conditions under which the inmates were living and in their efforts to ascertain the condition and whereabouts of their children after the successive fires that left a number of inmates dead or injured, or transferred to adult prisons. Pleadings of the State 141. Concerning the violation of Article 19 to Article 1(1) thereof, the State admitted application and in the Court’s order of June charges made by the Commission. The State of the American Convention in relation to the alleged victims named in the 21, 2002. However, it denied certain further argued that: a) the Center was moved from Emboscada to Asunción to enable families to visit more frequently and to put more emphasis on socialization programs, with the support of nongovernmental organizations; b) structural problems with the system for handling juvenile offenders meant that the special protection that this vulnerable sector requires was completely neglected. However, those structural problems were gradually corrected, to the point that the Center itself was permanently closed;

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