A/HRC/10/44 page 13 40. Another controversial issue concerns the death row phenomenon. In 1993, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of the British House of Lords held in Pratt and Morgan v. Attorney General of Jamaica that any detention on death row for more than five years violated the constitutional prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment.24 The Human Rights Committee criticized this approach by stating that the case law of the Privy Council “conveys a message to States parties retaining the death penalty that they should carry out a capital sentence as expeditiously as possible after it was imposed. This is not a message the Committee would wish to convey to States parties. Life on death row, harsh as it may be, is preferable to death”.25 Consequently, even in cases of detention on death row for more than 10 years, the Committee maintained its jurisprudence of not finding a violation of article 7 of the Covenant unless death row was aggravated by particularly harsh prison conditions.26 D. The death penalty and human dignity 41. The differing views reached by the Human Rights Committee and other authorities in grappling with the question whether detention on death row and of various methods of execution are compatible with the right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment suggest the need for a different, more fundamental approach to the matter. Again, useful guidance is provided by the reasons for the finding that corporal punishment amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In reaching this conclusion, the international human rights monitoring bodies did not examine the suffering caused by physical chastisement itself. On the contrary, in Tyrer v. United Kingdom, the European Court explicitly found that, although the applicant did not suffer any severe or long-lasting physical effects, his punishment whereby he was treated as an object in the power of authorities constituted an assault on precisely that which is one of the main purposes of article 3 to protect, namely a person’s dignity and physical integrity.27 The same idea was expressed at about the same time by Supreme Court judge Justice Brennan with regard to the death penalty: “The fatal constitutional infirmity in the punishment of death is that it treats members of the human race as non-humans, as objects to be toyed with and 24 Judgement of 2 November 1993 (2 AC 1). 25 Decision of 22 March 1996 in Errol Johnson v. Jamaica, Comm. No. 588/1994, para. 8.4. 26 See for example the decisions in La Vende and Bickaroo v. Trinidad and Tobago, Comm. Nos. 554 and 555/1993; and Francis v. Jamaica, communication No. 606/1994. 27 The African Commission approvingly quoted this judgement in Curtis Francis Doebbler v. Sudan and added “There is no right for individuals, and particularly the Government of a country to apply physical violence to individuals for offences. Such a right would be tantamount to sanctioning State-sponsored torture under the Charter and contrary to the very nature of this human rights treaty.”