5 administrative and legislative as well as judicial control and oversight of detention conditions (the latter being especially important) was acknowledged, and domestic legal control was transferred to international law in the mid-20th century. III. The Reaction of Ratione Personae Law: the Central Position of the Victims in the Legal System 14. It was the reaction of the Law, gaining strength, and the impact of International Human Rights Law was decisive. Today there is, for example, a vast jurisprudence on Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, asserting the ordre public nature of the oversight, under the European Convention, of all measures that could breach the right to the human person’s liberty and security; detention –necessarily ordered by law- can only be justified in regards to one of the requirements set forth in Article 5(1) of the Convention.13 At the same time, based on the experience accrued by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Antonio Cassese has suggested that when a person has been detained and this person has four rights (those of being promptly informed of his or her basic rights, of prompt notification of the detention to his or her next of kin, of access to an attorney, and of being promptly examined by a physician), "then there is an objective inhuman or degrading treatment on some of them, are not enshrined in we have entered a `danger zone': treatment less likely."14 chance that the police will find it difficult to inflict him or her. On the other hand, if these rights, or legislation or are not applied in practice, we know the objective defences are lacking that make ill- 15. I am moved to another reflection by the instant case of Tibi versus Ecuador, as a microcosm of what happens in the daily life of prisons in various places. Under the infrahuman incarceration conditions that prevail in so many countries throughout the world, the detainees –including the aggressors- as stated before, often become “institutional victims,” increasing the spiral of violence issuing from a “pathological social order” that especially punishes marginalized persons.15 Punitive justice, given the conditions under which it is executed, thus becomes a sinister vicious circle,16 as shown by the instant case, among many others. 16. In a broad dimension, International Human Rights Law has contributed to recovery of the central position of the victim17 in the legal order. Criminology itself has sought to pay greater attention to the victim (and not only to the agent of the violation of his or her rights), but efforts in this direction are unable to transcend the approach on the victim as the passive subject of the crime, while it would be necessary to go further.18 In the conceptual universe of International Human Rights 13 . J.L. Murdoch, Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights - The Protection of Liberty and Security of Person, Strasbourg, Council of Europe, 1994, pp. 7-55. 14 A. Cassese, Inhuman States..., op. cit. supra n. (11), p. 21. 15 Ibid., pp. 139-140. 16 Ibid., pp. 140 and 150. . . . 17 . As in victimology, on a rather circumscribe level; see, e.g., G. Landrove Díaz, Victimología, Valencia, Ed. Tirant Lo Blanch, 1990, pp. 22-23 and 25-26.