The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area injection protocols, as well as passing legislation allowing them to keep information about where they get their supply a secret. Even if execution itself has not yet been found a cruel and unusual punishment under the Eight Amendment of the United States Constitution, a cruel and torturous death using untested drugs certainly is. Regarding the lack of transparency or secrecy surrounding executions, I have repeatedly called on retentionist states to end the practice of executions with little or no prior warning given to condemned prisoners and their families, a practice often observed in Belarus, the other retentionist State in the OSCE region.14 In 1999, the United Nations Human Rights Committee noted that complete secrecy surrounding the date of execution and the place of burial, and refusal to hand over the body for burial have the effect of intimidating or punishing families by intentionally leaving them in a state of uncertainty and mental distress. In the case of Natalia Schedko v. Belarus, the Committee found the authorities’ initial failure to notify a mother of the scheduled date for the execution of her son, and their subsequent persistent failure to notify her of the location of her son’s grave amounted to inhuman treatment of the mother, in violation of article 7 of the Covenant.15 Most recently, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights held that the prisoner must be informed in advance of the time and place of her or his execution and have a prior opportunity to meet with family or seek spiritual comfort. The failure of the prison authorities to inform the family and the lawyers of the date, the hour and the place of the execution, as well as the exact place of the burial, constitutes a violation of Article 5 of the African Charter, prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and fails to respect the human dignity of both the family and the prisoner, which further violates Article 5.16 While some methods of execution and other circumstances related to the implementation of the death penalty, including the “death row phenomenon”, often constitute violations of the prohibition of torture or other ill-treatment themselves, I have sought to demonstrate that, in certain cases, international law already expressly considers the death penalty to be a violation per se of the prohibition of torture or other ill-treatment. These standards hold that executions of persons belonging to certain 14  See Special Rapporteur 2015, Op. Cit., note 11, JUA 08/01/2014 Case No. BLR 1/2014 and JUA 01/10/2013 Case No. BLR 3/2013, <http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session28/Pages/ListReports. aspx>. 15  See United Nations Human Rights Committee, Natalia Schedko v. Belarus, Communication No. 886/1999, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/77/D/886/1999 (1999), <http://juris.ohchr.org/Search/Details/1037>. 16  See African Commission on Human and Peoples’s Rights, Interights & Ditshwanelo v. Republic of Botswana, communication 319/06 (2016), <http://www.achpr.org/communications/decision/319.06/>. 9