A/HRC/10/44 page 11 36. When the Declaration on Violence against Women was adopted in 1993, the prohibition of corporal punishment was extended to the private sphere of the family; in other words, an obligation was imposed on States to adopt legislative and other measures to protect women against domestic violence, including corporal punishment.13 In addition, the positive obligation of States to effectively prohibit and prevent corporal punishment of children has been confirmed by various monitoring bodies, including the Committee on the Rights of the Child in relation to article 19 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child14 and the European Committee of Social Rights in relation to the explicit provision in article 17 of the revised European Social Charter.15 37. Since corporal punishment in all its forms, as a judicial or criminal sanction, whether imposed by State authorities or by private actors, including schools and parents, has been qualified by all relevant intergovernmental human rights monitoring bodies as cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment, it follows that, under present international law, corporal punishment can no longer be justified, not even under the most exceptional situations. C. Capital punishment in the light of the prohibition of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment 38. The question therefore arises whether this legal reasoning should not be equally applied to capital punishment. After all, is capital punishment not an aggravated form of corporal punishment? If the amputation of limbs is considered cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment, how can beheading then be qualified differently? If even comparatively lenient forms of corporal punishment, such as 10 strokes on the buttocks, are absolutely prohibited under international human rights law, how can hanging, the electric chair, execution by a firing squad and other forms of capital punishment ever be justified under the very same provisions? 39. Interestingly enough, the jurisprudence of international human rights monitoring bodies is much less clear in relation to capital punishment than it is in relation to corporal punishment. Even the European Court of Human Rights, which already in 1989 had found the death row-phenomenon in Virginia to constitute inhuman or degrading punishment,16 never arrived at the conclusion that capital punishment per se violates article 3 of the European 13 See for example the reports of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, most recently in E/CN.4/2006/61 and A/HRC/4/34, and the report of the Special Rapporteur on torture in A/HRC/7/3. 14 See for example the concluding observations of the Committee on the State report of Monaco, 2002, CRC/C/15/Add.158, para. 26, on the State report of Antigua and Barbuda, 2003, CRC/C/15/Add.247, para. 36, on the State report of the former Republic of Macedonia, 2000, CRC/C/15/Add.118 and on the State report of Sri Lanka, 2003, CRC/C/15/Add.207, para. 29. 15 See for example the decisions of the European Committee of Social Rights on the collective complaints of OMCT v. Greece, Belgium and Ireland, Nos. 17, 18 and 21/2003. 16 Judgement of 7 July 1989 in Soering v. UK, Series A 161, para. 111.