101 Convention and the international rules governing juvenile justice, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice, and the United Nations Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of Their Liberty; c) it was systematic practice to hold juveniles for longer than what was reasonable, without even a hearing, with the result that juveniles spent long periods in preventive detention; d) the legal aid that the State provided was ineffective, as the great majority of the inmates were without legal representation and did not have the pro bono legal aid that would have allowed their court cases to go forward; e) convicted and accused inmates were not housed in separate quarters, which was a violation of the principle of presumption of innocence, recognized in the second paragraph of Article 8 of the Convention; f) under Paraguay’s previous criminal law, all children came under the jurisdiction of the regular criminal law courts as of the age of14. Although the new Child and Adolescent Code sets the minimum age for a finding of criminal responsibility at age 18, only part of the Code entered into force in November 2001; it was not until April 2002 that the full Code went into effect. As a result, the new Code in no way benefited the minors in the instant case; and g) when the minors were transferred to adult penal institutions, they were moved far from family and visitors; but they were also moved far from their attorneys, which left them with no chance of staging an effective legal defense. Pleadings of the representatives 197. With regard to the violation of Article 2 of the American Convention, in relation to Article 1(1) thereof, the representatives alleged that: a) the State violated those provisions of the Convention, to the detriment of all the alleged victims; b) under Articles 1(1) and 2 of the American Convention, States have an obligation to respect the rights recognized in the Convention and to ensure their free and full exercise to all persons subject to their jurisdiction. The principle of nondiscrimination is central to determining the nature of the State’s positive obligations to provide children with measures of protection; c) the obligation to ensure the free and full exercise of human rights is not satisfied merely because a system of laws is in place whose purpose is to make compliance with this obligation possible; instead, the obligation also means that the government must comport itself in such way as to ensure that an effective guarantee of free and full exercise of human rights exists in fact; and