INTRODUCTION

• 1. Liberty of person is an important component for the region in the human rights catalogue. Its history reveals the States’ misuse of their power to place a person in detention; the situation of imprisonment of people without cause, with no recourse to judicial review, reminds one of the need in the 17th century to pass the Petition of Rights in England. Some countries have had long periods in a state of emergency that allowed all kinds of human rights violations, among which frequently is that of the right to liberty of person. Even in times of democracy, the liberty of a person was infringed continually. Criminal procedural laws did not comply with standards and judges did not fare better. The most frequent way of handling cases was to put the person allegedly having committed a crime in preventive detention, with absolute disregard for the presumption of innocence established in Article 8 and of the requirements of the Convention to order a detention. The Convention established a comprehensive set of rules and there was hope that these rules would be turned into domestic ones to put an end to abuse. However, while States were in the process of assimilating the changes, the increasing attention paid to safeguarding internal security, particularly to fight terrorism and drugs, has interfered with this aim. Because of this, in recent years the region has witnessed a social regression to the old forms of dealing with criminal offenses, forms that are incompatible with human rights in general and Article 7 in particular. This makes the firmness of the Court’s jurisprudence on the matter an important element to counter the unwelcome effects of societies’ unease.

• 2. The American Convention titles this right as the “right to personal liberty,” but in its first paragraph it sets forth the right “to personal liberty and security.” The concepts of both “liberty” and “security” can be understood more broadly than what Article 7 of the Convention seems to suggest. The Court states that liberty “[i]n its broadest sense, […] is the ability to do or not do all that is lawfully allowed […] the right of every person to organize his individual and social life in keeping with his own choices and beliefs, and in accordance with the law.”