95. With regard to police checkpoints, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of Costa Rica considered that it was not possible to “conduct them indiscriminately and, especially, to force or oblige people to allow access to the interior of their vehicles, without the existence of notitia criminis or proven indications of the perpetration of a crime.” The Chamber found that “to proceed to search the interior of a vehicle in this type of police control, it is necessary to have the free and express consent of the driver, which means that there can be no coercion of any kind.” Regarding the requirements that must be met in this situation, the Chamber indicated that the police must act in keeping with specific protocols that establish the conditions, manner, grounds, etc. for carrying out controls. It stated that highway surveillance was not, in itself, unlawful or arbitrary; however, it should necessarily be related to the investigation of a criminal act and be carried out respecting criteria of reasonableness, which meant that it took into consideration the circumstances of each specific case. The Chamber concluded that “the act of stopping, searching and ordering a person to get out of his vehicle and proceeding to search this without any justification, as in the instant case, clearly exceeded the powers of the police under the Constitution.”124 96. This Court considers that the verification of objective elements before intercepting a vehicle or detaining someone for purposes of identification becomes particularly relevant in contexts such as that of Argentina, where the police have normalized the practice of detentions based on a suspicion of criminality, justifying this action by crime prevention and where, in addition, the domestic courts have validated this type of practice. 125 Thus, the Court reiterates the opinion of expert witness Sofía Tiscornia during the public hearing regarding the “practice” of Argentine law enforcement personnel of carrying out “detentions for statistical purposes” in order, “ostensibly, to respond to demands for security by specific groups of neighbors,” which, in the worst case scenario, entails “fabricating offenses or accusing innocent and defenseless people,” the persistence of which is facilitated by a “scant, when not inexistent, judicial control of police detentions.” According to the expert witness, this “has resulted in the legitimation of abusive controls of the population, harassment of poor workers and young people, unreported arrests, and searches without controls” against “a relevant number of persons.”126 97. The Court recalls that the interception of Mr. Fernández Prieto’s car and the detention for identification purposes of Mr. Tumbeiro failed to comply with the requirement of legality because they did not comply with the enabling conditions established by law for such acts and, to the contrary, were justified by the duty of crime prevention and by the evidence obtained (supra paras. 68 to 87). However, the Court considers that, even if the police action had been carried out under the exceptional conditions for detentions without a court order established in the law in force, the general and imprecise way in which those conditions were worded at the time the facts occurred allowed any type of “suspicion” of the authority to be sufficient to stop and search a person. Thus, the Court observes that article 4 of the Code of Criminal Procedures, article 284 of the National Criminal Procedural Code, and article 1 of Law 23,950 are significantly ambiguous as regards the parameters for detaining someone without a court order or in the absence of a situation of flagrante delicto. In sum, the absence of objective parameters that legitimately could justify a detention based on the existence of the Ruling 14821-2010 of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of Costa Rica of September 3, 2010. 124 Cf. Judgment of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation of Argentina of December 12, 2002, “Monzón, Rubén Manuel” (evidence file, folios 917 to 926); Judgment of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation of Argentina of February 6, 2003, “Szmilowsky, Tomás Alejandro” (evidence file, folios 928 to 934), and Judgment of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation of Argentina of May 3, 2007, “Peralta Cano, Mauricio Esteban” (evidence file, folios 936 to 942). 125 Opinion provided by Sofía Tiscornia before the Inter-American Court during the public hearing held on March 11, 2020. 126 31