A/60/316 16. On 26 June 2005, on the occasion of the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the Special Rapporteur, together with the Committee against Torture, the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, issued a joint statement. 17. On 14 July 2005, the Special Rapporteur delivered the keynote address of the Supplementary Human Dimension Meeting on Human Rights and the Fight against Terrorism convened by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna. In his statement he emphasized that attempts to circumvent the absolute and non-derogable nature of the prohibition against torture, especially in the context of counter-terrorism strategies, undermined the consensus on the primacy of human rights and signified to terrorists that they had attained their goal of upsetting rules established by States. II. Corporal punishment 18. An issue that is of particular concern to the Special Rapporteur which he would like to draw attention to is corporal punishment.1 Since assuming the mandate, the Special Rapporteur has intervened by transmitting communications in response to allegations in a number of countries involving corporal punishment, such as amputation, stoning, strangulation, eye-gouging, flogging, and beating. In view of such continuing practices — often grounded in justifications of domestic law, including religious law (e.g. sharia), and argued that pain and suffering incidental to lawfully sanctioned punishments fall outside the prohibition against torture2 — the Special Rapporteur considers it necessary to review the relevant jurisprudence of international and regional human rights mechanisms. A. United Nations human rights treaty bodies 19. Both the Human Rights Committee and the Committee against Torture have called for the abolition of judicial corporal punishment.3 Indeed, in paragraph 5 of general comment No. 20 (1992), the Human Rights Committee stated that the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment under article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights must extend to corporal punishment, including excessive chastisement ordered as punishment for a crime or as an educative or disciplinary measure. 20. The Human Rights Committee has developed this view through relevant case law. In March 2000, in Osbourne v. Jamaica, in which the applicant had been sentenced to receive 10 strokes of the tamarind switch, the Committee held, “Irrespective of the nature of the crime that is to be punished, however brutal it may be, it is the firm opinion of the Committee that corporal punishment constitutes cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment contrary to article 7 of the Covenant.”4 This case-law was later confirmed in Sooklal v. Trinidad and Tobago,5 Higginson v. Jamaica6 and in 2004 in Errol Pryce v. Jamaica.7 21. The Human Rights Committee, in its concluding observations on Iraq, held that the imposition of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments such as amputation and branding were incompatible with article 7 of the Covenant, that the 6