A/HRC/31/16 violence and established appropriate penalties for the perpetrators, including relatives of the victim. With technical assistance from the Pan American Health Organization, the Department of Gender Affairs had been able to draft a domestic violence protocol that sought to outline the roles, responsibilities and functions of each State and nongovernmental partner in the identification, reporting and treatment of domestic violence situations. 16. The delegation expressed that, although discrimination against people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity was not specifically prohibited in the Constitution, and although no domestic law had yet been drafted regarding the same, there was no formal or positive legal discrimination against persons in Saint Kitts and Nevis on that basis. It asserted that no laws existed that prohibited discrimination against a person on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity and that the Government had asserted that it had received no reports of violence or discrimination on that basis. 17. It indicated that the country’s gender assessment had highlighted the women in the construction trades programme, which was mainly aimed at equipping women with the resources to gain more lucrative occupations and at combating gender stereotypes. 18. Regarding the death penalty, the delegation stated that, according to section 4 (1) of the Saint Kitts and Nevis Constitution, a person should not be deprived of his life intentionally, except in the implementation of a sentence by a court in respect of a conviction for the criminal offences of treason or murder, and that, in that connection, there was no relevant law in relation to giving effect to the death penalty in the case of treason. 19. The delegation asserted that the relevant law in relation to murder cases was the Offences Against the Person Act and that the provision that would give effect to the death sentence was found to be unconstitutional. The mandatory nature of the death sentence was challenged and found to be inconsistent with the Constitution. Since 1993, with the seminal decision of the Privy Council in the case of Pratt and Morgan v. Attorney General of Jamaica (1993) 43 WIR 340: (1994) A.C. 1, which definitively established that the delay in the execution of a convicted prisoner under sentence of death could well offend the constitutional provision prohibiting degrading or inhumane treatment, the death penalty had not been implemented for any such convict who had spent a period of five years in prison after being sentenced. 20. The delegation underscored that Saint Kitts and Nevis had not imposed the death penalty for several years and that it was in fact very rare, with only three persons having been executed within the previous 30 years and none in almost 7 years. 21. Saint Kitts and Nevis had not imposed the death penalty since its first universal periodic review, reserving such sentences for only the “worst of the worst” cases. Four individuals had, in fact, through the appeal process, had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment or vacated. Recent statistics proved that crime in the State was on the decline, and it was clear that, although heinous crime continued to be a concern, the number of persons sentenced to death in recent years was also on a downward trend and, to date, only one person remained on death row. 22. The delegation of Saint Kitts and Nevis requested once again that it be granted technical and other resources to amend any prison policies and to maintain consistent and regular capacity-building programmes for prison officers. Subsequent to the first universal periodic review, parliament passed the Police Complaints Act in 2014, which provided for the receipt, investigation and determination of complaints by the public against the National Police and for related matters, and authorized the establishment of an independent body — the Police Complaints Commission — and a complaints unit within the police force. 5