The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area–Background Paper 2019 degrading treatment or punishment in Article 7 of the Covenant – then the provision of Article 6 (2) cannot “save” the death penalty.9 More recently, during the period covered by this report, the UN Human Rights Committee has adopted a General Comment (No. 36), on the right to life, which spends considerable time in carefully making clear that support for the remaining foothold is running out. Building upon Article 6 (6), the General Comment notes “that States parties that are not yet totally abolitionist should be on an irrevocable path towards complete eradication of the death penalty, de facto and de jure, in the foreseeable future. The death penalty cannot be reconciled with full respect for the right to life, and abolition of the death penalty is both desirable and necessary for the enhancement of human dignity and progressive development of human rights.”10 The understanding of international law as progressively abolitionist was shared in 2015 by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, in its General Comment No. 3 on the right to life, which highlighted that the vast majority of African States have now abolished the death penalty in law or in practice, and which underlined that “international law requires those States that have not yet abolished the death penalty to take steps towards its abolition in order to secure the rights to life and to dignity, in addition to other rights such as the right to be free from torture, and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”11 The imperative to move away from the death penalty is clear. According to the UN Human Rights Committee, states “must be on an irrevocable path” towards its complete eradication, and the African Commission requested states to “take steps” in that direction. The same message of a need to gravitate towards abolition is conveyed by the politically binding commitment of the OSCE participating States to keep complete abolition “under consideration.” I have previously described this as the debate taking a “practical turn,” moving beyond the question of whether the death penalty per se is a violation of the right to life, and turning to the practical question of whether it can ever be implemented 9  See Christof Heyns & Thomas Probert, “The Right to Life and the Progressive Abolition of the Death Penalty”, in Moving Away from the Death Penalty: Argument, Trends and Perspectives, (New York: United Nations, 2015), p. 217. 10  UN Human Rights Committee, General Comment No. 36 on Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, on the right to life, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/GC/36, 30 October 2018, para. 50. 11  African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, General Comment No.3 on the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights: The Right to Life (Article 4) (2015), 9 August 2012, para. 22. 8