The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area to commute the sentence, strongly condemned the execution.115 The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights condemned the execution, which it described as taking place “in defiance of the precautionary measures the IACHR granted in his favor and without having complied with the recommendations issued by the Commission in the Merits Report on his case.”116 On November 2011, a petition was filed against the United States with the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights on behalf of Ivan Teleguz. It was claimed that Teleguz, a death row inmate in Virginia, did not receive an effective and adequate defence, that his due process rights were violated and that he was arrested, tried and sentenced to death without having been informed of his right to contact Ukrainian consular officials, in accordance with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. On 22 December 2011, the Inter-American Commission granted precautionary measures for Teleguz and requested that the United States refrain from executing him until the merits of the petition are considered.117 In April 2012, the Department of Defense of the United States announced that Kuwaiti-born Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants – of whom two are Yemeni, one Saudi and one Pakistani – would face capital charges before military commissions for their alleged participation in the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States. The response to ODIHR’s questionnaire stated that the United States “takes its consular notification obligations very seriously and is committed to continuing its work to uphold those obligations”. The government pledged its commitment to securing the timely enactment of the Consular Notification Compliance Act of 2011.118 Individuals with mental illness or disability At the 2011 ODIHR Human Dimension Implementation Meeting, recommendations were made to the United States to abolish the death penalty for the mentally ill. In November 2011, Reginald Brooks, a 66 year-old man diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, was executed in Ohio after spending almost 30 years on death row.119 Edwin Turner was executed in February 2012 in Mississippi, for a crime that was 115  Statement of the International Commission against Death Penalty on the execution of Humberto Leal Garcia, Madrid, 9 July 2011, <http://www.icomdp.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/09.07.2011.-Declaración-ejecuciónHumberto-Leal-scan-.pdf>. 116  Organization of American States, “Press Release: IACHR Condemns Execution of Leal García in the United States”, 8 July 2011 <http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/media_center/PReleases/2011/067.asp> 117  IACHR precautionary measures can be found at: http://www.oas.org/en/iachr/decisions/precautionary.asp 118  U.S. Response, op. cit., note 88. 119  Amnesty International Death Penalty 2011, op. cit., note 73. 24