15 principles of the United Nations for the protection of all persons subject to any form of detention or imprisonment, adopted on December 9, 1988, and the United Nations basic principles for the treatment of inmates, adopted on December 14, 1990. If these are the standards, which no one rejects –setting aside, of course, frontal challenges of criminal Law and prison itself-, how has this been reflected in the reality of prisons? 66. Prison is, ultimately –less than capital punishment, but that depends on the circumstances under which each of them operates, specifically, on the dual level of prevention and execution-, an extreme act of force by the State against a citizen, legitimized by certain conditions that make it inevitable –rather than desirable or commendable- and that, at the same time, strictly define its borders. Therefore, precautionary or penal measures that entail deprivation of liberty must be rigorously based on the requirements of lawfulness, necessity, and proportionality. This must apply throughout the prosecutional function of the State: from criminal commination (substantive Law, preventive establishment of punishability) and concrete procedural matters (procedural law, ordering of precautionary measures) to execution of punishment (executory law, final judicial adjustment of the legal consequences ordered in the judgment of conviction or in the condemnatory section of a judgment that encompasses the declaratory ruling and conviction). 67. A deprivation of liberty is unacceptable if it is not set forth specifically in the law –understood as the Court has in Advisory Opinion OC-6/86, of May 9, 1986, regarding the term ‘laws’ in Article 30 of the American Convention on Human Rights-, if it is not truly necessary and if it is disproportionate in regards to the unlawful act: capital punishment or life sentence for trifling crimes, an excess widely documented in historical experience and not unknown in current experience. This radical moderation of the violence exercised by the State must be reflected in the conditions of compliance with procedural precautions and execution of punishment. The Court has asserted this several times. 68. This moderation –strictly speaking, rationality- in the use of force involved in measures regarding the individual’s liberty encompasses provisional measures, such as those set forth in the September 13, 1996 ruling, in the Loayza Tamayo case. The description given then continues to reflect the conditions of the detainees in many prisons. In that case, the accused –stated the ruling- “is subjected to a regime of inhuman and degrading treatment caused by incommunicado detention and by being enclosed for 23 1/2 hours a day in a damp, cold cell measuring approximately 2 meters by 3 meters, without direct ventilation, containing cement bunks, a latrine and a hand-basin... The cell has no direct lighting and is only dimly and indirectly lit from the fluorescent tubes in the corridors. She is not allowed neither a radio, newspapers nor magazines. She is allowed into the sunlight for only 20 to 30 minutes a day.” 69. Of course, moderation encompasses the whole process of incarceration, including acts that may have as their objective the prevention or punishment of unlawful behavior or reduction of resistance to authority. Regarding the latter type of situation, the judgments of the Court in the Neira Alegría and Durán and Ugarte cases are very significant, in regards to containment of a prisoners’ riot through a massively destructive use of explosives, which caused the death of dozens of inmates. 70. At this time of assessment of the situation of human rights in the Americas, fifty-five years after the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, thirtyfive after the signing of the American Convention, and twenty-five since the establishment of the Inter-American Court, we must take note of the horrors that persist in many prisons, flagrantly violating the most basic rights of inmates. In this regard, the condition of helplessness, exposition, vulnerability that I referred to