11 aforementioned wrong. The Law has been unable to do much in the present context, but it is something, and at least it helps keep alive the hope of a minimum of human justice. The reaction of the Law reflects acknowledgment that rehabilitation of the victims of arbitrary detention and torture cannot be restricted merely to the psychological resources that they may have to defend themselves from that wrong, worsened by the indifference of the exterior world. 35. Realization of justice, with due reparations, helps reorganize human relations and restructure the psyche of all the victims. Realization of justice must take place from the standpoint of the integral nature of the personality of the victims. Reparations rather soothe the suffering of the victims when they corroborate the realization of justice. Finally, as I pointed out in my Separate Opinion in the case of the “Street Children” (Villagrán Morales et al. versus Guatemala, Reparations, Judgment of 26.05.2001), “Human suffering has a dimension which is both personal and social. Thus, the damage caused to each human being, however humble he might be, affects the community itself as a whole. As the present case discloses, the victims are multiplied in the persons of the surviving close relatives, who, furthermore, are forced to live with the great pain inflicted by the silence, the indifference and the oblivion of the others.” (para. 22). Reparations are, therefore a dimension that is necessarily both individual and social. 36. As the Judgment of the Inter-American Court in the instant Case of Tibi versus Ecuador shows, the Law also protects those who are forgotten in prison, in the house of the dead, which Dostoyevsky critically portrayed so brilliantly in the 19th century. Said reaction of the Law, both ratione personae and ratione materiae, indicates that the human conscience has awoken to the pressing need for and the aim of decisively putting an end to the scourges of arbitrary detention and torture. The general principles of the Law play a very significant role here. With this, there is a reason to hope that the D.D. Tibis, the Joseph K.s, and the Mersaults will gradually diminish in number, until they no longer suffer in the prisons of the “post-modern”, insensitive, indifferent and brutalized world in which we live. Antônio Augusto Cançado Trindade Judge Pablo Saavedra-Alessandri Secretary