standards for determining the existence of malice. Thus, the Judiciary’s rejection of the State’s punitive powers also resulted in a perceptible decrease in the chilling effect of the criminal proceedings in question because the establishment of precedents by the higher court in the sense of rejecting the conviction of the journalists contributed, to a certain extent, to providing a sense of security for the exercise of freedom of expression. 87. However, I reaffirm, in this opinion, my convinced and strict adherence to the Court’s case law that domestic laws or judicial decisions that affect or restrict freedom of expression and of the press should only be deferred to up until the point at which they tolerate the promotion of a general situation that inhibits the free circulation of information of public interest, which is totally contrary to the objectives and the spirit of the protection of freedom of speech that the Convention evidently proclaims. Ultimately, with the exception of some types of content that are particularly offensive to fundamental rights, what the treaty seeks, in relation to the freedom of expression in general, is a sort of inter-American version of a free marketplace of ideas, in the immortalized phrase attributed to the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in which the truth is exposed by the free discussion of ideas and not by reasons of state. IV. Final considerations 88. The judgment delivered by the Court in this case has made an exhaustive analysis of the international responsibility of the State derived from the civil judicial prosecution of the victims for activities carried out in the ordinary exercise of journalism, and I therefore agree fully with the reasoning and operative paragraphs of this prudent judgment. 89. With regard to the issues of criminal law that have been touched on parenthetically in this case, I believe that the judgment, in its substantial obiter dicta to which I am adding these considerations, adds to the significant historical evolution of the precedents developed by this Court in the sense of increasingly restricting the possibility of States using criminal law to curb offenses against honor, especially where the dissemination of matters of public interest is concerned. 90. Naturally, I will leave for another occasion – because it relates to a matter that falls outside the instant case – the delicate issue of whether there is a legitimate residual role for criminal protection against excesses in the exercise of freedom of expression. 91. For now, suffice for me to put on record that, even in exceptional situations, the control of proportionality in the use of criminal protection should be as strict as possible in the sensitive area of freedom of expression. It is only if civil protection is patently insufficient to protect the right to honor that, in theory, a more severe state response may be proposed, and it is naturally the State Party that has the heavy burden of proving the overriding need for measures that could be incompatible with the Convention based on urgent and essential collective interests. 92. Although this case constitutes an important addition to the Court’s case law, some of the fundamental criminal issues that it deals with make me particularly cautious about taking a more incisive position and declaring the incompatibility with the Convention of article 7 of the Printing Act of Costa Rica. 93. Despite this, I consider that the instructive dicta contained in the judgment will soon require coherence and, inevitably, the Court will need to review the role of criminal liability as an ordinary means of protecting manifestations of the exercise of freedom of expression, especially the freedoms of speech, opinion and the press. On that occasion, the Court must