CONCURRING OPINION OF JUDGE A. A. CANÇADO-TRINDADE 1. I am voting in favor of adoption of these provisional measures through which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights is ordering that protection be extended to all the inmates at the Urso Branco Prison in Brazil. Still, I feel obliged to revisit the conceptual construct that I have been advocating in the Inter-American Court, which concerns obligations erga omnes of protection under the American Convention. I have no intention of repeating, in detail, everything I have thus far said on the subject, particularly in my other Concurring Opinions on the Orders for Provisional Measures adopted by the Court in the case of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó (of June 18, 2002), the Communities of the Jiguamiandó and of the Curbaradó (of March 6, 2003), the Kankuamo Indigenous Community (of July 5, 2004) and the Indigenous Community of Sarayaku Indigenous People (July 6, 2004). Instead, I prefer to summarize some of the central points I made on the subject, with a view to effective protection of human rights in a complex situation such as that of the inmates at the Urso Branco Prison. 2. Indeed, well before these cases were brought to this Court’s attention, I had already warned of the pressing need to develop doctrine and jurisprudence on the legal regime of obligations erga omnes of protection of the rights of the human being ((for example, in my Concurring Opinions in Blake v. Guatemala, Judgment on the Merits, January 24, 1998, par. 28, and Judgment on Reparations, January 22, 1999, par. 40). In my Concurring Opinion in the Las Palmeras vs. Colombia case, Judgment on Preliminary Objections, February 4, 2000, I suggested that a proper understanding of the broad scope of the general obligation to ensure the rights recognized in the American Convention, provided for in Article 1(1) thereof, could be instrumental in developing the obligations erga omnes of protection (paragraphs 2 and 6-7). 3. The general obligation to ensure –I added in my Concurring Opinion in the Las Palmeras case- is incumbent upon each State Party individually and on all of them collectively (obligation erga omnes partes - pars. 11-12). I wrote that "there could hardly be better examples of mechanism for application of the obligations erga omnes of protection (…) than the methods of supervision foreseen in the human rights treaties themselves (...) for the exercise of the collective guarantee of the protected rights. (...) the mechanisms for application of the obligations erga omnes partes of protection already exist, and what is urgently need is to develop their legal regime, with special attention to the positive obligations and the juridical consequences of the violations of such obligations. (par. 14). 4. The general obligation to ensure includes the application of provisional measures of protection under the American Convention. In my concurring opinion in the case of the Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian Origin in the Dominican Republic (Order of August 18, 2000), I took the liberty of pointing out the change that had occurred in both the rationale and object of provisional measures of protection (which historically moved from civil procedural law to public international law), resulting from the impact of their application within the framework of the International Law of Human Rights (paragraphs 17 and 23): with their introduction into the conceptual universe of the International Law of Human Rights, provisional measures undergo a transition where, rather than safeguarding the efficacy of the functions of courts, they protect the most fundamental rights of the human person.