SEPARATE OPINION OF JUDGE A.A. CANÇADO TRINDADE 1. In the instant Judgment in the Case of Tibi versus Ecuador, in which I have concurred with my vote, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ruled on a new case that adequately reflects the contingencies of the human condition and the importance of the realization of justice and of guarantees of non-recidivism regarding acts injurious to human rights as a measure of reparation. Given the concerns raised by the instant case, and the significance of the matter addressed by the Court, I feel the obligation to state, in the instant Separate Opinion, my personal reflections as the basis for my position on the matter dealt with here. I will focus my reflections on four basic points: a) the impact of arbitrary detention and conditions of incarceration on the human conscience; b) self-rehabilitation as a defense and reparatio of the affronts of the world; c) the reaction of ratione personae Law (the central position of the victims in the legal system); and d) the reaction of ratione materiae Law (absolute prohibition of torture). I. The Impact of Arbitrary Detention and Conditions of Incarceration on the Human Conscience. 2. D.D. Tibi, like Josef K., was detained without knowing why. “Somebody had slandered Josef K.", - wrote Franz Kafka at the very beginning of The Process (1925), - "as without having done anything wrong he was detained one morning” (chapter I). D.D. Tibi was more fortunate than banker Josef K., but they both suffered something incomprehensible, if not absurd. Josef K. could only await his summary execution, shortly before which he exclaimed: "Where was the judge whom I never saw? Where was the high court before which I never appeared?” (chapter X). From the beginning of the saga to its end, his efforts were futile in face of the arbitrariness of a cruelly virtual and discouraging “justice”. 3. D.D. Tibi was less unfortunate than Kafka's character, because he recovered his liberty and, also, he lives in a time in which, alongside the national courts (with their idiosyncrasies) there are also international human rights courts. The instant Judgment, just adopted by the Inter-American Court, can contribute to recovery of his faith in human justice. In his case, a portrait of daily life in the jails not only of Latin America but throughout the world speaks eloquently of the insensitiveness, indifference, and irrationality of the world that surrounds us all. 4. There are few testimonies of the suffering resulting from arbitrary detention as eloquent as Antonio Gramsci’s well-known Prison Notebooks (1926-1936). In a manner that is even literary, he wrote that, during the initial period of his detention, it already seemed to him that time was thicker, as space no longer existed for him; and he described the rose that was “completely reborn,” that flowered more the following year, and did not even exclude the possibility of another ��timid little rose” from flowering during that year (so he hoped), and he confessed that he felt the seasonal cycle as “flesh of his flesh”. When he took a train, after 10 years of detention, “thrown on the fringes of the world,” and after not having seen for years those same roofs, those same walls, those same “turbid faces," he “experienced a terrible impression” when he saw that “during this time the vast world had continued to exist with its meadows, its forests, the common people, the groups of children,