3 III. Criminal justice and human rights 10. In view of these considerations, it seems to me that it is useful to discuss two central themes in the adjudicatory case on which the Court decided in its September 7, 2004 judgment, and to which I attach this Opinion. These are themes that the Court addresses once again, in a manner and in terms that have already been expressed before, regarding its more significant aspects, in other rulings issued by means of adjudicatory decisions or advisory opinions. I am referring to due legal process in criminal matters –but also, pursuant to the Court’s jurisprudence, in other types of contentious issues- and to the system of institutions regarding deprivation of liberty, whether preventive or protective, whether punitive or executive, both for adults and for minors. Proceedings and prisons have been, are and perhaps will be – although we hope not- the scene for the most reiterated, grave, and notorious violations of human rights. It is time to look at those scenes, in regards to which there are constant complaints but insufficient reforms, to radically modify them. 11. Both themes have certain common denominators. One and the other are, as has often been said, a crucial space for effective exercise of human rights. Strictly speaking, so-called criminal justice –or, in less pretentious terms, the penal systemis a critical area for human rights. In it, those rights are at very grave risk, and within it they are most severely affected, in a manner that is painfully frequent. That is due to the fact that criminal prosecution places the State, which has greater strength because it has the monopoly of –supposedly legitimate- violence, and has the greatest capacity to intervene in people’s lives, with the individuals who are indicted, prosecuted or convicted, who are identified as “enemies of society” and who certainly do not have, even in the more developed legal systems, the juridical and material strength that the State does have. As I have underlined, the epigraph of some proceedings is eloquent, when it states the identity of the contenders and suggests the relative weight of each one on their pan of the scale: The State versus X, The Republic against Y, The King against Z, and so forth. There could hardly be a better basis for the balancing or equalizing trend that is a characteristic of modern proceedings. 12. It is therefore precisely there, in the domain of criminal justice, where it is most necessary to “work” on the issue of human rights –without neglecting other areas- through categorical proclamations, imperative legal standards and inflexible practices, all of them ensured through the vigor and effectiveness of guarantee instruments in suitable hands: competent, independent, impartial, whose strength and integrity ensure effective exercise of rights in a terrain that is especially favorable to violations. This process of ensuring essential, radical, irreducible rights, also runs into the problem of public perception running astray due to posing of false dilemmas that oppose the requirements of public security to the “weaknesses” that protection of human rights allegedly entails. Authoritarian trends that threaten the proceedings and the prisons, although not only them, circulate through the passageway opened by false dilemmas. IV. The “guarantor” State 13. In the judgments in the Tibi and the “Juvenile Reeducation Institute” cases, as well as previously in the rulings on the cases of Hilaire, Constantine and Benjamin (June 21, 2002 judgment) and Bulacio (September 18, 2003 judgment), and also in Advisory Opinion OC-17/02, issued on August 28, 2002, on the juridical situation and the rights of the child, the Inter-American Court has asserted the specific role of the State as guarantor regarding the rights of those deprived of or restricted in their liberty in State institutions and under the responsibility of agents of the State.