SEPARATE DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGES A.A. CANÇADO TRINDADE AND M.E. VENTURA ROBLES 1. We have concurred with our votes in adoption the instant Judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the case of the Yakye Axa Indigenous Community versus Paraguay, with most of which we basically agree, with the exception of operative paragraph No. 4 and the respective Whereas paragraphs, regarding which we firmly differ, based on the grounds we will set forth below, in the instant Joint Dissenting Opinion. Furthermore, we believe that the Court’s decision with regard to operative paragraph No. 4 failed to consider other points that we deem essential, especially with regard to the fundamental right to life, and compromised the balance and harmony of the instant Judgment of the Court as a whole. 2. The Inter-American Court has asserted a concept of the fundamental right to life that encompasses conditions for a decent life (Article 4(1) of the American Convention on Human Rights). In this regard, in a well-known obiter dictum in the Villagrán Morales et al. versus Guatemala case (“Street Children” case, Judgment on the merits, November 19,1999, para. 144), the Court stated that: The right to life is a fundamental human right, and the exercise of this right is essential for the exercise of all other human rights. If it is not respected, all rights lack meaning. Owing to the fundamental nature of the right to life, restrictive approaches to it are inadmissible. In essence, the fundamental right to life includes, not only the right of every human being not to be deprived of his life arbitrarily, but also the right that he will not be prevented from having access to the conditions that guarantee a decent existence. States have the obligation to guarantee the creation of the conditions required in order that violations of this basic right do not occur and, in particular, the duty to prevent its agents from violating it. 3. In the instant case, the Court accepted this hermeneutics when it found, in operative paragraph 3 of this Judgment, an abridgment of Article 4(1) of the American Convention, in combination with Article 1(1) of that same Convention, to the detriment of the members of the Yakye Axa Community, for not taking steps to address the conditions that prejudiced their possibilities of having a decent life. In this regard, we fully agreed with the warning by the Court that the State must take steps to ensure the right to adequate nutrition, access to clean water, and health care, and specifically, the State must care for the elderly with chronic diseases and those in a terminal phase, to avoid unnecessary suffering. In this case, it must take into account that in the Yakye Axa indigenous Community oral transmission of their culture to the younger generations is primarily entrusted to the elderly (para. 175). 4. Along these same lines of reflection, we have deemed, in our respective individual Dissenting Opinions in the previous case of the Serrano Cruz Sisters versus El Salvador (Judgment of 01.03.2005), that the fundamental right to life takes on a higher dimension when the right to personal and cultural identity is taken into consideration; the latter cannot be disassociated from the legal personality of the individual as an international subject. The right to identity clearly follows from the circumstances of the instant case (also see paras. 18-19, infra).