A/HRC/10/44 page 15 by the South African Constitutional Court in the landmark judgement of State v. Makwanyane and Mchunu in June 1995.31 The Constitutional Court provided a comprehensive review of the case law of international human rights monitoring bodies at that time and then arrived at the firm conclusion that capital punishment in any case must be regarded as cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. E. Conclusions and recommendations 46. What conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of developments pertaining to the death penalty in the light of the prohibition of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment? In principle, the answer to the legal question posed by the French delegate in the General Assembly depends on the interpretation of the words “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” in article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and similar provisions in other international and regional human rights treaties. Traditionally, States and human rights monitoring bodies followed a systematic and historic interpretation of the right to personal integrity and human dignity in conjunction with the right to life, which explicitly contains an exception for capital punishment. This interpretation is in line with article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which stipulates that provisions of international treaties should be interpreted in their context. At the time of the adoption of the respective treaties, this was a fully legitimate method of interpretation. 47. International human rights monitoring bodies and domestic courts, however, developed and effectively apply a dynamic interpretation of the provisions of human rights treaty law. They consider human rights treaties “living instruments” that need to be interpreted in the light of present-day conditions. The application of this method of interpretation to the right to personal integrity and human dignity by regional human rights courts and universal treaty monitoring bodies has the effect that corporal punishment, which was not regarded as cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment at the time of the adoption of the respective treaties, is today considered such. Consequently, States that still practise corporal punishment as a judicial or disciplinary measure or that do not take effective legislative and other measures to prohibit and prevent corporal punishment in the private sphere are found to violate the absolute prohibition of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment. Although the systematic interpretation of international human rights treaties has to date prevented regional and universal treaty monitoring bodies from applying the same dynamic interpretation of the right to personal integrity and human dignity to the death penalty, this legal reasoning is increasingly being challenged by obvious inconsistencies deriving from the distinction between corporal and capital punishment and by the universal trend towards the abolition of capital punishment. 48. The Human Rights Council may wish to follow the call of the General Assembly in paragraph 4 of its resolution 62/149 to continue the work of the Commission on Human 31 Judgement of 6 June 1995, case No. CCT/3/94.