that merits corporal punishment, without the corresponding criminal act being obviously prescribed and the indicia of the guilt of a person appear substantiated, the Investigating Tribunal shall decree the detention of the accused, by a substantiated decision […]”134 117. The Court, in a prior case, in analyzing that provision, concluded that “the State failed to comply with its obligation embodied in Article 2 of the Convention, insofar as its domestic legislation did not establish sufficient guarantees of the right to personal liberty, since it allowed imprisonment based only on ‘indications of criminal responsibility,’ without establishing, also, that it is necessary for the measure to serve a legitimate purpose.”135 118. The Court notes that Article 182 was applied to the facts of this case and that the judicial decisions of December 10, 1998 and February 12, 1999 only considered, in ordering the preventive deprivations of liberty, the existence of indicia of the participation of the persons accused of the unlawful act being investigated.136 It does not appear that those decisions had as their object to achieve the valid purposes of preventive detention; that is, to ensure that such persons do not obstruct the development of the proceedings or that they do not evade the action of justice (supra para. 98). Nor does it show that those decisions examined the requests for alternate measures of the deprivation of liberty. 119. Consequently, in applying Article 182, the intervening judicial authority did not offer sufficient grounds regarding the attainment of a legitimate purpose, compatible with the Convention, with respect to the preventive deprivations of liberty ordered in this case. Nor do the facts show that there was a judicial periodic review of the appropriateness of the preventive detentions. According to the explanation of the expert Vásquez González, the domestic legal order in force when the orders were issued, and during most of the time of the criminal proceedings of the victims, such a periodic review was not guaranteed.137 Therefore, to the detriment of the persons who had been preventively detained, the State violated the right not to be submitted to arbitrary detention, enshrined in Article 7(3) of the Convention. This infringement, with respect The text of Article 182 of the CCP in force at the time of the events was included in the written expert opinion of Magaly Mercedes Vásquez González. 134 135 Cf. Case of Barreto Leiva v. Venezuela, para. 116. 136 The Court notes that the expert Nelson Orlando Mejía Duran stated that there was an obligation to “substantiate” in order to decree preventive detention and that this “imposes the necessity to clearly indicate the grounds and the procedural basis of the restriction, so that in order to safeguard the presumption of innocence the detention would not be imposed arbitrarily.” The expert added that the restriction of liberty by means of an order of detention does not lose its instrumental nature with respect to the proceedings and, in the event of a precautionary measure, the case should continue until a final decision is reached.” (Cf. Written expert opinion of Nelson Orlando Mejía Duran.) The Court notes that the expert opinion refers to the obligation that the acts that order the preventive deprivation of liberty contain the rationale, which must be based on the applicable domestic legal order. This requirement, however, does not refer to the compatibility of such applicable domestic legislation with the American Convention. The expert stated that “on July 1, 1999, the new Code fully entered into force (in March 1998, three of its institutions had earlier entered into force).” The expert did not identify which three institutions. From what the expert stated, it can be understood that the review of preventive detention could take place beginning with the remedies presented to question the measure, but not on its own. She pointed out that “the procedural order in force on the date on which the members of the González family were deprived of their liberty did not guarantee […] the periodic review of measures of detention. Since the appeal was filed against the decision that declared it unfounded, the judge of the case could not, due to a lack of functional competence, review the measure that he ordered in order to terminate it.” (Cf. Written expert opinion of Magaly Mercedes Vásquez González). 137 32