criminal prosecution of the person making the report, or their spouse or ascendants, descendants, siblings or life companion or partner.” 7. All the foregoing provisions, although not totally in conformity with each other, may be harmonized perfectly pursuant to the sound rules of interpretation. 8. Nevertheless, the Code of Criminal Procedure in force at the time of the facts is surprising by including an article that disrupts this harmony – article 229: “Anyone who witnesses the perpetration of an offense subject to public prosecution is obliged to immediately inform the Prosecutor General, the police or the nearest magistrate. If the knowledge originates from news stories or reports, the complaint is optional. If the offense depends on an individual complaint, it is not possible to proceed without this, except for acts that require urgent investigation.” This provision has been retained in article 216 of the procedural code currently in force. 9. This article seeks to impose a reporting obligation on any individual, above and beyond the provisions of the State’s Constitution. The said provision is incompatible with the model of a republican and democratic State at the service of the citizen; rather it reflects the contrary. The State and the law are at the service of the individual it is not the individual who is at the service of the State or the law. 10. The citizen or inhabitant has a duty to respect the law, but he is not a police officer or an agent of justice of the State. Evidently, the case of the official who assumes a particular responsibility by engaging in the exercise of the power or the administration of the State is different, because he occupies a particular position of guarantor. 11. The attempt to impose the duties inherent to agents of its criminal justice system or to the State’s officials on every inhabitant signifies considering that the latter have an obligation of total loyalty to the State, and this is not in the nature of an inconsequential concept of law; rather it belongs to an anthropomorphic or organization-oriented conception of the State in which the citizens are reduced to the condition of cells, entities or subsystems at its service. 12. This requirement of total loyalty was the famous Treue of Nazi law, the violation of which – disloyalty or Untreue – was considered the ultimate essence of any offense, because it involved the violation, by omission, of the supposed ethical mandates that emanated from the people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft), into which the individuality of every human being of the same race melted. 13. We could continue to examine totalitarianisms and find similar requirements of extreme total loyalty to the State by the Stalinist dictatorship of the proletariat or to the Fascist enterprise as a synthesis of past, present and future generations. But this requirement of total loyalty has no place within the framework of the democratic and republic rule of law, where its inhabitants are individuals to whom the State must ensure the means for self-realization (so that everyone may become what they wish based on their existential choice) and they may never be used as a medium for the supposed realization of any transcendent or supra-personal entity such as Volksgemeinschaft, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the corporate State, national security or any similar ideological construct. 14. Be that as it may, it should be emphasized that, even though the provisions of article 229 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of El Salvador are contrary to the dignity of the person established in the American Convention, it is not necessary to censure it as such, because it has the very curious particularity of not being a real legal norm, because it lacks a sanction since this is not contemplated in article 312 of the Criminal Code, which falls within the framework indicated by the Constitution. 5