2 establishes limitations to rights must have: adopted within the framework of institutions and processes of a democratic society and seeking common good. The Court has reflected on the characteristics a law must have within the framework of the protection to human rights (OC-6/86, paras. 32 and following). And the Tribunal itself has mentioned that the concept of common good, within the context of the Convention, refers to “the conditions of social life that allow the members of society to reach their greatest level of personal development and the greatest validity of democratic values” (OC-5/85, para. 66). Likewise, the Inter-American jurisprudence examined the connection between radical concepts of political-legal order based on the philosophical convictions that form the basis of the American Convention: “The concept of rights and liberties and, therefore, that of there guarantees, is also inseparable from the system of values and principles that inspire it. In a democratic society the rights and liberties inherent to the person, their guarantees and the Constitutional State form a triad, and each of its components is defined, completed, and makes sense in function of the others” (OC-8/87, para. 26). 5. I return now to the procedural due process. This matter has occupied the InterAmerican Court since it started it advisory functions. It has dealt with it, extensively, when deciding cases and provisional measures. It is a highly traveled road, maybe the most from among the many that this Tribunal has considered in its judicial exercise during a quarter of a century. From here on with the designation due process I will refer now to the issues analyzed in Article 8 of the Convention as well as those covered in Articles 5 and 7 regarding the treatment of people held in custody, the duration of the detention, and the conditions in which it occurs. Eventually, the issues of the due process are projected on other stipulations of the Convention that refer to different rights, or cover matters referred to in the mentioned articles: this has occurred, in some points, in the case of Article 4. 6. It seems natural that there is an abundance of matters regarding the due process within the scene of infringements of human rights. When serving criminal justice –or criminal injustice—there is an ample quota of violence comparable only with that committed by the criminals: there is a parallel course between the history of crime and that of the reactions devised to fight it, generally under the name of criminal justice. It is in that space that the most dramatic encounter –as I have mentioned on several occasions— between the State invested with all its power and the individual divested of merits and defenses, except for those that may be provided to it by the kindness of the powerful, first, and the development of Law, later, has always wanted to be legitimized and many times has not even been legalized. 7. The overflowing of the repression occurs here with greater ease than in other areas of public work, because the first turns on those who have been designated “public enemies”: the criminal that damages individual and collective goods that are highly appreciated –thus the condition of criminal, and not just illicit, behavior of the act committed—and with it they put in risk the existence of society. They are, therefore, a greater social opponent; an enemy even. It would be difficult to find a more natural and vulnerable addressee of state actions. This explains the performance of the persecutions and punishments, their phenomenology, characteristics, consequences, and slow appearance of the means of protection for the individual that faces the State as a defendant, and that may, in effect, be guilty, but that may also be innocent of the charges made against him, and in any case continues to be a human being. 8. In the exercise of civilization the imperious need for the State to provide security