3 to society –provision that constitutes one of the reasons for the existence of the State, among the most radical and necessary—and the ethical, and today judicial, demand that it be done without harming human dignity or prejudging with regard to the responsibility subject to trial. From this complicated conciliation –natural realm for the construction and preservation of the Constitutional State--, which guarantees the liberty of all, not only the security of the defendant, arises the due process of law in its different aspects, with the criminal one at the head, and with it what could be presented as a dilemma in other circumstances dispels: security or justice, peach or law. In the era of guarantees, the due process that leads to a clarification and a fair judgment – thus a due process that helps to have a formal and material access to justice—is a security of said conciliation and of the fragile balance on which it is installed. 9. When criminality increases, driven by numerous factors that rarely consider the political one –unless dealing with a politician used to looking beyond appearances and to acting beyond the symptoms--, the persecution is extreme. This behavior is explicable. Before social desperation, soon turned into exasperation, the conflict between the due process and crime control comes back into scene, a dialectic that is currently present throughout the criminal process, as has been stated by Mireille Delmas-Marty in what refers to Europe and that certainly finds multiple manifestations in other countries besieged by traditional crime and evolved delinquency, that public efforts cannot successfully prevent, face, or reduce. 10. The Inter-American Court, that has on many occasions dealt with the due process, as mentioned, stated that it is a “set of requirements that must be observed in the procedural instances so that the people are in condition to adequately defend their rights before any (…) act of the State that may affect them” (Advisory Opinion OC-18, para. 123). This concept, according to the jurisprudence of the Court, is not exclusive of criminal matters; it reaches other specialties of the trial and, in general, of the procedure, when dealing with the rights of people: the “group of minimum guarantees established in numeral 2 of (Article 8) is applied also to (other) orders and, therefore, in this type of matters the individual also has the right, in general, to the due process that applies in criminal matters.” (Case of the Constitutional Court, para. 70) 11. OC-16 established that in order for there to be a due process “a defendant must be able to exercise his rights and defend his interests in an effective manner and in conditions of equality with other defendants. To this effect, it is useful to remember that the process is a means to endure, to the extent possible, the fair solution of a controversy. The set of acts of different characteristics normally united under the concept of the due process of law attends to this purpose.” (para. 117) On other opportunities, the Court stated that the existence of real judicial guarantees –in which the due process is affirmed—requires that in it all the requirements that “serve to protect, ensure, or enforce the title or exercise of a right, (OC-8/87, para. 25) be observed, that is, the “conditions that must be complied with to ensure the adequate defense of those whose rights or obligations are under judicial consideration.” (OC9/87, para. 28) 12. In my Concurring opinion to Advisory Opinion AO-16 I stated that “what we know as the ‘due criminal process’, the backbone of the prosecution of a crime, is the result of this long road, fed by the law, jurisprudence –among it, the progressive North American jurisprudence—and doctrine. This has occurred at a national level as well as in international matters. The developments of the first years have been