6 of the latter is the judgment delivered in the Caesar case regarding a national judicial ruling that called for the application of the punishment of flogging, provided for in the penal laws. 23. The Inter-American Court has acted within this context when examining and deciding the Case of Raxcacó Reyes in the judgment of September 15, 2005. First, the Court considered the scope of Article 4(2) of the American Convention with regard to the case sub judice; a restrictive provision on the one hand and an abolitionist provision on the other. Both aspects of this provision were examined: (a) from the perspective of the authorization of capital punishment only for the so-called “most serious crimes,” which is found in the first part of paragraph 2, and (b) from the perspective of the future proscription, in relation to States that, at the time they ratified the Convention or adhered to it, had not yet abolished the death penalty, as regards “crimes to which it is not applied presently”; that is, to crimes punishable by a juridical effect other than the death penalty. 24. Article 4(2), which the Court declares has been violated, contains “substantive” and “non-substantive” points of law. With regard to the former, the paragraph refers to three issues: (a) the importance of the crime, considered in itself (“the most serious crimes”); (b) the specific respect for the principle of legality (nulla poena sine praevia lege), and (c) the restriction of the death penalty to crimes for which it is applied presently (namely, illegal actions punishable by the death penalty when the State became bound by the Convention) and the absolute exclusion of crimes “to which it is not applied presently.” I shall not examine the second issue, which is not relevant to the present case. I shall only examine the first and third. Furthermore, there is no need to examine the “non-substantive” elements contained in Article 4(2) at this time: competent court and final judgment, with regard to which no violation of the Convention was found. 25. In my concurring opinion to the judgment in the Hilaire… cases, I examined the concept of “the most serious crimes.” At that time, I observed, and now repeat, that, in order to establish the seriousness of the crimes that may be punished by the death penalty, certain objective elements of the criminal judgment must be taken into account; above all, the juridical right protected by the crime category and harmed by the violator; and then, the way in which this juridical right has been affected, which can also involve new information to weigh the greater or lesser seriousness of the conduct executed by the agent. Evidently, the most important juridical right protected by the penal system is human life. This is also the central right – the support or linchpin of all the others – in the order of human rights. 26. The greatest harm to this right is its elimination or destruction, not the attempt to eliminate it. In terms of penal law, we are alluding to the crime of homicide and not to attempted homicide and, subjectively, to the perpetrator of the crime, not to the accomplice, collaborator or accessory after the fact. However, this is not sufficient to resolve the point that we are examining now, because there are different manifestations of illicit and culpable elimination of human life with malice aforethought; indeed, criminal extinction exists in the case of simple homicide (basic type), but also in the case of aggravated homicide (due to the relationship that exists between the perpetrator and the victim, the motives of the former, the means used, etcetera). Consequently, the law usually provides for different punishments for each category of homicide.