which their rights and obligations are established by public entities. And these guarantees do not emanate from discretional or arbitrary criteria of the Inter-American Court, but are supported by those that the States incorporated explicitly into the American Convention, in order to provide the individual with a basis of guarantees for the processing of his rights. 14. This consistent interpretation of the Court merely seeks to establish, in the exercise of its authority, that the States are obliged to ensure that the State organs that are called on to determine rights and obligations do so in a proceeding that grants the individual the necessary means to defend his legitimate interests and, consequently, the possibility of obtaining a decision that is duly founded, a fundamental requirement to ensure justice in each specific case. 15. Thus, the essential aspect of the contents of Article 8, does not reside in the nature of the authority within the constitutional system of a country, but rather in what the proceeding seeks to determine and decide concerning the guarantees in favor of the individual. If the meaning of the article is to offer certain basic guarantees in the determination of rights or obligations of the individual, it seems clear that the crucial and significant aspect is this, and not the nature of the authority. Hence, this appears to be the central criterion to establish that it is obligatory to respect the pertinent requirements of Article 8 in extrajudicial mechanisms. In other words, it is clear that the Convention has established that the rights of the individual must be ensured in both the non-judicial and judicial spheres, taking into account what is applicable in a non-judicial proceeding. 16. In this case we find ourselves faced with administrative proceedings filed against the Central Bank of Uruguay in which the Court has found a violation of the procedural guarantees of the individuals who initiated a procedure before this non-judicial entity of the Oriental Republic. Even though it is not a judicial authority, the Central Bank of Uruguay was obliged to respect the procedural guarantees established in Article 8 of the Convention, because the applicants’ rights would be determined in this procedure. As the Court has established in its judgment, this did not happen in this case, both as regards the right to be heard of 539 victims and the due founding of the decision in the case of two of them. 17. Failure to observe some of these guarantees in the procedure before the Central Bank of Uruguay is the aspect that has led the Court to establish failure to respect the guarantees of Article 8 of the Convention in this case. Indeed, as stated in this judgment (para. 142), the “special administrative procedure was ineffective, in light of what it had to determine […], because the Central Bank made an incomplete analysis of the merits of the petitions; this meant that the State violated the material sphere of the right to be heard protected by Article 8(1) of the American Convention, in relation to Article 1(1) thereof, to the detriment of the 539 persons who filed a petition under article 31 of Law 17,613.” The Court decided also (para. 185) that, since the State had not ensured an adequate founding of the decisions of the Central Bank corresponding to the claims of the victims Alicia Barbani Duarte and Jorge Marenales, a violation of the right to nondiscriminatory treatment had been constituted, in relation to the procedural guarantee of an adequate reasoning [of the decision], protected in Articles 1(1) and 8(1) of the Convention. 18. The foregoing is particularly relevant not only for the development of non-judicial proceedings for the determination of rights and obligations, but also for the social need that the regulatory capacity of the State is strengthened and enhanced in areas such as 4