- 5with his fellow human being and with the outside world. The concept of the right to identity began to be developed more thoroughly in the 1980s and 1990s. 17. The concept of individual subjective rights has a longer history, originating in particular in the jusnaturalism school of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and systematized in legal doctrine throughout the nineteenth century. However, in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, this concept continued to be framed in domestic public law, emanating from the public authorities, and influenced by legal positivism.6 Subjective rights were conceived as the prerogative of the individual as defined by the legal system in question (objective law).7 It is not surprising that the right to identity transcends subjective rights. 18. However, as I stated in my concurring opinion in the Court’s Advisory Opinion No. 17 on the Juridical Status and Human Rights of the Child (2002), it cannot be denied that: “The crystallization of the concept of individual subjective right, and its systematization, achieved at least an advance towards a better understanding of the individual as a titulaire of rights. And they rendered possible, with the emergence of human rights at international level, the gradual overcoming of positive law. In the mid-XXth century, the impossibility became clear of the evolution of Law itself without the individual subjective right, expression of a true "human right."8 The emergence of universal human rights, as from the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of 1948, came to expand considerably the horizon of contemporary legal doctrine, disclosing the insufficiencies of the traditional conceptualization of the subjective right. The pressing needs of protection of the human being have much fostered this development. Universal human rights, superior to, and preceding, the State and any form of politico-social organization, and inherent to the human being, affirmed themselves as opposable to the public power itself. The international juridical personality of the human being crystallized itself as a limit to the discretion of State power. Human rights freed the conception of the subjective right from the chains of legal positivism. If, on the one hand, the legal category of the international juridical personality of the human being contributed to instrumentalize the vindication of the rights of the human person, emanated from International Law, - on the other hand the corpus juris of the universal human rights conferred upon the juridical personality of the individual a much wider dimension, no longer conditioned by the law emanated from the public power of the State " (paras. 47 and 49-50). 19. The right to identity reinforces the protection of human rights, protecting each individual against the denigration or violation of his “personal truth.”9 The right to identity, which encompasses the attributes and characteristics that individualize each human being, seeks to ensure that the individual is faithfully represented in his projection towards his social environment and the outside world.10 Hence, its relevance 6 L. Ferrajoli, Derecho y Razón - Teoría del Garantismo Penal, 5a. ed., Madrid, Ed. Trotta, 2001, pp. 912-913. 7 Ch. Eisenmann, "Une nouvelle conception du droit subjectif: la théorie de M. Jean Dabin", 60 Revue du droit public et de la science politique en France et à l'étranger (1954) pp. 753-774, esp. pp. 754-755 and 771. 8 J. Dabin, El Derecho Subjetivo, Madrid, Ed. Rev. de Derecho Privado, 1955, p. 64. 9 C. Fernández Sessarego, Derecho a la Identidad Personal, Buenos Aires, Edit. Astrea, 1992, pp. 99100 and 126. 10 Cf. ibid., pp. 113 and 115.