62 facilities; create problems of coexistence and favor violence between prisoners and prison staff. All these, to the detriment of prisoners and prison staff, due to the hard and dangerous conditions in which they carry out their daily tasks. 205. Given that these arguments and the acknowledgment refer to facts that occurred while Mr. Vélez Loor was held in custody by the Panamanian State due to his irregular immigration status, confined in national penitentiary centers, the Tribunal shall refer next to the need for the people deprived of liberty given their immigration status to be held in places different from those destined for those people accused or convicted of serious crimes, in order to analyze, then, the issues that remain of the controversy. a) Requirement that undocumented migrants be held in places different than those intended for convicted persons or persons in custody pending trial 206. The Commission as well as the representatives alleged the State’s obligation to separate prisoners who have committed criminal crimes from those who are detained for immigration issues. The State did not put forward a specific argument regarding this issue, but it accepted “the existence of a serious deficiency in the systems of classification of those deprived of liberty.” As to Cellblock 6 of La Joyita Penitentiary Center, where Mr. Vélez Loor was imprisoned, it indicated that "it is a cellblock of medium to low security which accommodated people who were deprived of liberty for the same reasons for which Mr. Vélez was detained, as well as others detained for reasons that excluded dangerous inmates.” Likewise, it alleged that the opening of shelters for migrants of the National Office of Immigration, which house only migrants, guarantees said separation. 207. Even though the Court has already referred to the particular vulnerable situation of migrants (supra para. 98), it is important to emphasize how this vulnerability is even more critical when, due to the irregular immigration status, migrants are held in penitentiary centers together with individuals undergoing a criminal trial and/or serving time for the commission of a crime,233 like what happened in this case. Said situation makes migrants prone to suffer abusive treatment, given that it entails an individual de facto situation of lack of protection in relation to the rest of the detainees. Hence, within the framework of its obligations to guarantee the rights acknowledged in the Convention, the State must abstain from acting in such a way that favors, promotes, fosters, or deepens that vulnerability234 and it must adopt, when appropriate, the measures necessary and reasonable to prevent or protect the rights of whoever is in that situation. 208. Therefore, in the case their detention is necessary and proportionate, migrants must be held in facilities specifically destined for that purpose, according to their legal situation and not in common prisons, the purpose of which is incompatible with the nature of the possible detention of a person for her or his immigration status, or other places where placed together with those accused or convicted for crimes. This principle of separation certainly attends to the distinct purposes of deprivations of liberty. Certainly, when dealing with convicted persons, the imprisonment conditions must tend to the “essential aim” of the custodial measures that is the “reform and 233 Similarly, United Nations, Report presented by the Special Rapporteur, Mrs. Gabriela Rodriguez Pizarro, according to Resolution 2002/62 of the Commission on Human Rights E/CN.4/2003/85, December 30, 2002, para. 16, and United Nations, Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, supra note 84, folio 2027, para. 41. 234 Cf. Juridical Condition and Rights of the Undocumented Migrants, supra note 82, paras. 112 and 172; Case of Manuel Cepeda Vargas, supra note 11, para. 172, and Case of Perozo, supra note 9, para. 118.