9 23. The facts of the present case, revealing a great cultural density, lead me to a last line of thinking in this Separate Opinion. Beyond the slim formal juridicism, legal norms encompass values (moral, cultural, and others), which the jurist cannot ignore. These values, in turn, reflect the truly universal concern, - present in all cultures, - with the cycle of life and death34, a concern which underlies the search for a meaning to human existence. The universal human rights give support to the human beings in face of the vulnerability and precariousness of their condition. 24. The adepts of the so-called "cultural relativism" advance an exclusively "ethnocentric" perspective, which reveals a fragmented and unsustainable vision of the human kind. Contrary to what they allege, the universal human rights are enriched by the multiple cultural experiences, which, on their turn, benefit themselves from their own openness to the universal minimum standards of the treatment of the human being, - just as revealed in the international contentieux of the case Bámaca Velásquez versus Guatemala, before the Inter-American Court. With that, the universal legitimacy of human rights is reaffirmed, in a world marked by pluralism and the anguish common to all human beings in face of death and the destiny of each one. 25. The present case, in effect, stresses the necessity to consider the human being in relation to the social milieu in which he lives35 (and dies), and his rights in relation to the social milieu in which they are exercised36. Furthermore, there are other conclusions of transcendental importance that can be extracted from the case Bámaca Velásquez, in the light of the reflections which have here been expressed. In sum, in my view, what we conceive as the human kind comprises not only the living beings (titulaires of the human rights), but also the dead (with their spiritual legacy). The respect for the dead is in effect due in the persons of the living. Human solidarity has a wider dimension than the purely social solidarity, in so far as it manifests itself also in the links of solidarity between the dead and the living. 26. Human suffering projects itself in time, finding expression also in the domain of Law. In the cas d'espèce, the intensity of the human suffering was duly taken into account by the Inter-American Court, both in the determination (in the previous Judgment as to the merits) of the violations of the American Convention (to the detriment of the fatal victim as well as of their relatives who survived them), as well as 34 . To the musician Yehudi Menuhin, e.g., one can "feel the revelation of the divinity by means of (...) a recognition of the process which goes from life to death, which passes through an endless succession and continuity of lives and deaths"; Y. Menuhin, "Epílogo", in La Revolución de la Conciencia - Un Diálogo Multidisciplinario (eds. E. Laszlo et alii), Barcelona, Ed. Kairós, 2000, pp. 184-185. 35 . In his monumental Study of History, Arnold Toynbee pointe out that the "intelligible unities" of the historical study are not the States, not even the nations, but rather the social milieux. But the "source of action" in these latter, in the vision of Toynbee, lies in the individual, as all evolution emerges from the creative spirit of individuals (or minorities), who first disseminate their discoveries or ideas, and later seek to convert the social environment into the new modus vivendi called for by them. Likewise, individuals cannot be themselves without interacting with their fellowmen (A.J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Oxford, University Press, 1970 [reprint], pp. 1-11 and 209-240). The great historian, always attentive to the spiritual dimension, - as in his inspired essay Civilization on Trial (1948), - took as "nucleus" for the historical study the human being himself and his values. 36 . For an assertion of the need to consider the "individual and collective aspects" of human rights, "concurrently and in a balanced" way, cf. U.N., United Nations Workshop for the Asia-Pacific Region on Human Rights Issues - Report (Jakarta, January 1993), N.Y., U.N., 1993, p. 1.