5 concerning imprisonment, which, in the history of punishment has replaced capital punishment and corporal punishment. 15. Certainly, relevant criticisms have been made regarding this project associated with punishment. More often than not, these are reasonable remarks it is possible to share. However, we still lack —in real, effective terms rather than notional or conceptual— proper substitutes to replace it immediately, effectively and advantageously. Behind the decline of the rehabilitative theory of punishment await the eliminative and afflictive options, such as capital punishment and corporal punishment —e.g. mutilation, branding or flogging— respectively. That is why readaptation continues to be, in spite of its weaknesses and contradictions, a reasonable check on the absolute penal power of the State, which would otherwise know no limits. 16. The rehabilitative intention is to be found in Article 6(5) of the American Convention, which ascribes to punishment consisting of deprivation of liberty the “essential aim” of promoting “the reform and social readaptation of the prisoners.” If this is the purpose of such punishment —its teleological mission, which provides the basic sense to the “positive” action of the State towards convicts— the limit to such action —a boundary that may not be crossed by any authority— lies in the preservation of human dignity. Thus, “all persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person” (Article 5(2) of the Convention). 17. It is true that these provisions relate to deprivation of liberty, but it is also true that the ideas shaping these provisions permeate the punishment system as a whole, notwithstanding other purposes related to such system —such as satisfying the rights and interests of the offended— or to certain forms of punishment specifically. It is impossible to suppose, even remotely, that flogging inflicted on a convict does not undermine “the respect for the inherent dignity of the human person”, or that it tends to achieve the “reform or readaptation” of the convict, in the only sense that may be meant in a democratic society and that are certainly far from being the intellectual or moral devastation of the subject, his absolute submission through violence, the imposition of pure physical pain, the humiliation of the flagellated person. All of this characterized the notion of punishment for society and the state in an increasingly distant past, which we should confine, once and for all, to the attic of history. 18. Censure of the form of punishment used in the instant case —flogging with the “cat o’ nine tails”— has its grounds in Article 5 of the American Convention, in the view of the Court. It entails, beyond any doubt, a brutal attack on a person’s integrity. This precept of the Convention, which refers to acts that violate the jus cogens, as has repeatedly occurred, condemns torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment or treatment, types of attack on a person’s integrity and of the violation of the right to humane treatment guaranteed to all persons. In my opinion, the flagellation under analysis has the characteristics of torture, whichever the international text where one may find its definition: be it the United Nations Convention of 1984 or the Inter-American Convention of 1985, beyond the differences between the two of them. 19. The elements described in said documents are present in the facts at issue here, among others: sufferings —which in the instant case were very intense— intentionally caused for the purpose of punishment. It is undoubtedly a form of