2 scope of its jurisdiction in light of Article 1(2) of the American Convention on Human Rights, which clarifies the connotation that this international instrument gives to the concept of “person”: the human being, the individual, as the possessor of rights and freedoms. The Court cannot go beyond the frontier established by the Convention that defines its jurisdiction. But, neither can it abstain from the thorough examination of the issues submitted to it, to define their real characteristics, origins implications, consequences, etc., in order to understand the nature of the violations committed, when applicable, and come to an appropriate decision on possible reparations. 7. Consequently, in several decisions – particularly in relation to members of indigenous or ethnic groups – the Court has considered the rights of the individuals, who are members of the communities or groups, within their necessary, characteristic, physical framework: the collective rights of the communities to which they belong: their culture, which endows them with a “cultural identity,” to which they have a right and which influences their individuality and personal and social development, and their customs and practices, which coalesce to integrate a point of reference required by the Court in order to understand and decide the cases submitted to it. It would be useless and lead to erroneous conclusions to extract the individual cases from the context in which they occur. Examining them in their own circumstances – in the broadest meaning of the expression: actual and historical – not only contributes factual information to understand the events, but also legal information through the cultural references – to establish their juridical nature and the corresponding implications. 8. The Court has also had to examine certain issues relating to other large human groups, also exposed to violations or victims of violations, even when the elements of their social identification are different from those that exist in the contentious cases that I referred to in the previous paragraphs. It has done this, especially in recent years, in various advisory opinions that have helped clarify the scope of the human rights of people exposed to rejection, abuse or marginalization; for example, foreign detainees, in the terms of Advisory Opinion OC-16; children who commit offences or are subject to measures of public protection, Advisory Opinion OC-17, and migrant workers, especially if they are undocumented, in Advisory Opinion OC-18. I have added separate opinions to these three opinions. I refer to what I said in them. 9. The Inter-American Court has also examined pending issues relating to groups of people with professional or occupational connections or the same interests. In these cases, it has been necessary to order provisional measures in the terms of Article 63(2) of the Convention, in order to preserve rights and maintain unharmed the juridical prerogatives they protect. In these cases, the Court has gone further, an advance explained and justified taking into account the inherent characteristics of the cases submitted and the very nature of provisional measures. Indeed, the Court has ruled on immediate precautionary protection in relation to many unidentified persons, whose rights were in grave danger. These are not measures for a group, a corporation, an association, a people, but rather for each member: physical persons, possessors of the endangered rights. 10. This new scope of international protection, produced by the evolution of interAmerican case law – which could advance even further to the extent allowed by the reasonable interpretation of the Convention – occurred following the order on provisional measures in the Case of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó,