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different valid personal options that are not subject to the assessment or discretion of
the State’s agents, as long as the restriction or limitation factors that I previously
mentioned are not present.
49.
It is possible that the person that speaks this language –as well as others, in
different means—may also speak other different languages or that he may be in
conditions to learn them. However, this does not mean that the State’s agents are
empowered to impose the use of a language different to the one the individual wishes
to use when communicating with other subjects. A different matter would be to try to
carry out judicial acts that must be recorded in the language officially accepted for
those effects (case in which the intervention of an interpreter or translator may be
provided), but in the case sub judice this did not come up at any time.
50.
Also, the detention regimen puts in movement specific relationships between
the State, who is in charge of the detainees, and the latter, which are subordinated to
the public power in conditions that are particularly intense and extensive. Therefore, in
the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court the situation of guarantor –with special
characteristics—that corresponds to the State as custodian of the detainees or
executor of convictions that imply confinement, and, in general, as controller of the
behavior of those subject both immediately and constantly to its authority and
supervision is weighed in, and it may not make and execute for itself numerous
decisions that would be common in ordinary circumstances.
51.
The precautionary or criminal deprivation of the personal liberty brings with it
severe restrictions, inherent to the detention itself, which must be limited to their
inevitable minimum expression, and it must not imply the reduction or suppression of
other rights, whose restriction is not a necessary consequence of the deprivation of
freedom. This is the case of the use of a person’s own language, pursuant to the
selection that the person in whom the right to expression vests makes in this regard.
The State’s condition of guarantor supposes, from one perspective, that it has the
power to order, supervise, and control; and from another, that it has the obligation to
ensure the good course of the rights that are not subject to restriction or condition.
Sergio García-Ramírez
Judge
Pablo Saavedra-Alessandri
Secretary
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