6 16. For a long time I have been insisting that the great juridical revolution of the XXth century has been the one consolidated by the International Law of Human Rights, in erecting the human being as subject of International Law, endowed, as a true complaining party against the State, with full juridico-procedural capacity at international level18. The present case of the "Street Children", in which the forgotten ones of this world succeed to resort to an international tribunal in order to vindicate their rights as human beings, gives an eloquent testimony of this. In the ambit of application of this new corpus juris, it is undoubtedly the victim who appropriately assumes the central position. The impact of the International Law of Human Rights in other areas of Law (both public and private) timely occurs, to the effect of humanizing them. This development appears in conformity with the very aims of Law, the addressees of whose norms are, ultimately, the human beings. 17. The impact of the International Law of Human Rights in the evolution of a specific aspect of contemporary International Law, namely, that pertaining to the right of foreign detainees to information on consular assistance in the framework of the guarantees of the due process of law, to refer to one example, is clearly inferred from the Advisory Opinion n. 16 of the Inter-American Court (of O1 October 1999). In a classic and luminous monograph (titled The Sources of International Law) published in 1946, the Danish jurist Max Sorensen pondered that the elements and influences which determine the content of legal regulation (social needs, ideal exigencies), emanate from the social conscience prevailing in the international community. This being so, the very validity of the juridical norms becomes reality also "in the psychological domain, and it is at this level that the value conceptions are manifested"; Sorensen concludes that the value criteria respond to an "interior necessity"19. 18. One ought to go, definitively, beyond appearances, beyond shadows. But even if, along the cammin di nostra vita, we transcend at times the shadows and behold the light, no one can assure us that darkness will not fall again. But to this latter once more the light would follow, - like in the succession of night and day, or of day and night20. The tension of the clear-dark, of the advances intermingled with setbacks, is proper of the human condition, and it constitutes, in fact, one of the most precious legacies of the thinking of the ancient Greeks (always so contemporary) to the evolution of the human thinking itself, which has penetrated human conscience throughout the centuries. The 18 . Cf., besides my previous studies, recently, A.A. Cançado Trindade, "Las Cláusulas Pétreas de la Protección Internacional del Ser Humano: El Acceso Directo de los Individuos a la Justicia a Nivel Internacional y la Intangibilidad de la Jurisdicción Obligatoria de los Tribunales Internacionales de Derechos Humanos", in El Sistema Interamericano de Protección de los Derechos Humanos en el Umbral del Siglo XXI - Memoria del Seminario (November 1999), volume I, San José of Costa Rica, Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2001, pp. 3-68. 19 . M. Sorensen, Les sources du droit international, Copenhague, Munksgaard, 1946, pp. 13-14 and 254. - It is always good to recall such lucid considerations, as the study of Law nowadays tends to be reduced to a mere reading of positive law. The positivists, in the domain of Law, and the so-called "realists", in the field of social sciences, have shown themselves indifferent to concerns such as the ones pointed out herein, and invariably subservient to power (to the established order in a given historical moment), disclosing a regrettable intellectual cowardice. 20 . Just as darkness falls when light vanishes, likewise the first ray of light emerge out of the last shadows of obscurity.