7 Bosico v. Dominican Republic, namely, the recognition of legal personality endorsed by Article 3 of the Pact of San José, in an emphatic language: “Every person has the right to recognition as a person before the law”. The Court found that this right has been violated to the detriment of several people. 25. Of course, it is worth analyzing the various aspects or expressions of the right in hand, which is the crux of any democratic legal system, taken as a whole, as well as of the system established by the American Convention. Note that the Convention provides for the rights of persons and, under Article 1(2), the Pact of San José it takes it that human beings are the persons to whom the Pact applies. The idea of a person and the corresponding concept of personality are the gateway to the legal system, and denying the latter would necessarily imply denying or degrading the former. 26. It can be affirmed that the right to personality implies the recognition that the human being, as a member of a politically organized society and ruled by of law, necessarily has rights and duties; that it is essential that such status, with its manifold consequences, be protected by the legal system and by those enforcing it; that no one can be extcluded from such primary condition as a “person before the law”, and be cast out of the legal system, and deprived of rights, freedoms, powers, guarantees, etc., which are the signs, the implications or the consequences of the recognition of personality by the State, notwithstanding, of course, the lawful restrictions or conditions that could be imposed thereon. This perspective casts light on one of the dimensions of juridical personality: the one having a material or substantive character. 27. The material recognition of juridical personality would be pointless or nonexistent in the absence of the means to assert it, which would result in a —de jure or de facto— deprivation of personality before the legal system, or at least of legal standing to take the consequences thereof, particularly to the extent that such benefits involve rights on which development, well-being or perhaps even life hinge. Therefore, the availability of such means or instrument constitutes an implicit requirement for the effectiveness of the express recognition of personality before the law under Article 3 of the Pact. This is the formal or instrumental dimension of this right. 28. Article 3 of the Convention was violated inasmuch as the persons mentioned in the Judgment by the Court were outside the official records, which meant that they could not be issued and given the documents enabling them to receive vital services, for which reason they had to go without them and were barred from any real possibility of accessing them. Once again, we are faced with failure by the State to comply with its duty to provide goods and services, not through a positive violation by excluding individuals from their previously acquired status of persons before the law or by striking them from records or by withdrawing their documents, but by omitting to perform a duty, a conduct of abstention that could and should have been rectified, bearing in mind the conditions of marginalization and vulnerability of the victims and considering the characteristics the guarantor role of the State could reasonably be expected to assume. Pablo Saavedra-Alessandri Secretary Sergio García-Ramírez President