A/HRC/4/20 page 16 56. The understanding that mandatory death sentences are per se violations of human rights law originates in the efforts of a number of judicial and quasi-judicial bodies to distinguish between mandatory death penalty laws that respected human rights and those that did not. Each began by attempting to discern whether a particular offence for which the death penalty was mandatory was sufficiently narrowly drawn that anyone convicted of that offence could justly receive the death penalty. The process of pursuing this case-by-case approach led to the conclusion that even if the offence had been drafted to cover only the “most serious crimes”, there would invariably be other factors regarding each individual case that would be relevant to the legal determination of whether a death sentence would be consistent with also upholding the defendant’s human rights.143 The conclusion, in theory as well as in practice, was that respect for human rights can be reliably ensured in death penalty cases only if the judiciary engages in case-specific, individualized sentencing that accounts for all of the relevant factors.144 57. The Human Rights Committee’s first consideration of the mandatory death penalty turned on the requirement of ICCPR that a “sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes”.145 In Lubuto v. Zambia the applicant had been sentenced to death pursuant to a law that made the death sentence mandatory for the offence of aggravated robbery in which firearms were used. The Committee concluded that the offence was defined in an overinclusive manner because it included crimes that “did not produce the death or wounding of any person”.146 Because some of the crimes covered by the offence were not among the most serious, a mandatory death sentence was inappropriate. This was not a finding that mandatory death sentences inherently violate international law. Although the mandatory death penalty in question was unacceptable, the Committee’s tacit view was that its defects could be remedied by a legislative amendment that would draw an additional distinction in its codification of the offence. 58. Subsequent cases persuaded the Committee that no such solution was viable in practice. In other words, legislative classifications are inherently overinclusive and that reliable proportionality is achievable only through individualized sentencing.147 Thompson v. Saint Vincent concerned a mandatory death sentence for murder, which was defined to include only “intentional acts of violence resulting in the death of a person”.148 The Committee found that the mandatory death sentence was “arbitrary”, even in these circumstances, because it would be arbitrary for the court not to consider the “defendant’s personal circumstances” and the “circumstances of the particular offence” in order to ascertain “whether this exceptional form of punishment is appropriate …”.149 In Kennedy v. Trinidad and Tobago, the Committee went even further when it found a mandatory death sentence for murder, defined to include “situations where a person commits a felony involving personal violence and where this violence results even inadvertently in the death of the victim”, to violate the prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of life.150 The problem identified by the Committee in this and subsequent cases was not that an individual was being sentenced to death for a crime that was not among the most serious. Rather, it was that conviction for a most serious crime was not per se sufficient to satisfy other requirements of human rights law.151 59. The same logical path - from testing offences carrying a mandatory death sentence for overinclusiveness to requiring individualized sentencing - has been followed by a number of other judicial organs, including the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council152 and the Supreme Court of India. The latter found in Mithu that the sheer range of scenarios in which