5 performance by the authorities involved in it. Such measures are, essentially, acts and guarantees of due process-. This is especially the case with respect to minors, who are in a situation of special defenselessness and vulnerability and who therefore face a specific and greater risk of abridgment of their fundamental rights and of detriment to their existence, sometimes irreparably. 19. Said controls, operating for specific purposes, always entail the presence and intervention of authorities or private individuals in support of the minors and to represent or protect their rights and interests. In accordance with this set of control measures, the next of kin or representatives or legal guardians of the minor must be immediately notified of his or her detention, as well as his or her attorney –and, in any case, the court-appointed defense counsel who may act immediately-, the consul of the State that he or she is a national of, the judge who must rule on legitimacy of the detention and justification of the proceeding, the physician who will certify the physical and psychological conditions of the minor and oversee the development of his or her situation at the detention center, and the social worker or assistant who will help establish and maintain access to the minor by those who can provide him or her care and protection. 20. Precautionary and coercive measures –first of all, the detention itself- must be organized pursuant to criteria that ensure that it is reasonable, necessary, and proportional, bearing in mind the exceptional nature that any precautionary restriction of rights must have in the legal order of a democratic society. Complaints have often been filed against certain practices of collective detention –called razzias, among other names-, which are based on the unsustainable logic of general charges, independent of individual responsibilities. If restriction of a right must be the consequence of an offense defined by law, and the responsibility of the person is strictly individual, coercive and precautionary means must also be based on actual occurrence of behaviors defined and forbidden by the general rule and on individual considerations that establish a clear and proven link between the individual offender and the measure that restricts his or her rights. 21. Implementation of coercive measures, in themselves a delicate and dangerous matter, especially when they pertain to personal liberty, must take place in appropriate physical spaces, which do not worsen the measures or make them extreme, adding to their natural consequences other harmful effects. They must also be entrusted to persons who have been duly selected and trained for this task, under rigorous control and supervision. 22. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has maintained that the State plays the role of guarantor, with the respective obligations, regarding the legally protected interests and rights of those under custody by the State itself. This position as a guarantor entails a certain duty of care, which as I stated before is reflected in actions and omissions required to fulfill the latter responsibility in each specific case according to its circumstances. This is not merely a matter of inferring consequences of the general duty of public authorities of providing security and protection to those subject to its jurisdiction, but also one of establishing the specific, direct and inescapable nature of this duty in the case of those subject, in the most intense and complete manner, de jure and de facto, to the powers of public authorities exercising custody of those persons or control of their specific situation (a concrete duty of care in both cases) even when they are entrusted to a third party. 23. As establishments and as systems, prisons and detention and “treatment” institutions for minors fit within the category of “total institutions,” where existence