9 another (that of the criminal), the execution of the death penalty is not simply death, as it carries with it certain rules of procedure, organization and a “public premeditation,” which are “the source of a moral suffering that is more terrible than death,” and therefore is not equal to other forms of death. Knowing, with great anxiety, that he will be executed (everything is “out of his hands”) and powerless before the public coalition that wills his death, the condemned is “kept in an inevitable state of inaction, but with a conscience that is his principal enemy.” In this way, the condemned is destroyed by the anticipation of the execution of the death penalty long before actually dying: “two deaths are inflicted upon him,” the first “worse than the other. (…) Compared to this torture, the punishment of an eye for an eye appears civilized.” 30 27. More than three decades had passed since the original publication of these thoughts, when an international human rights tribunal, the European Court in Strasbourg, held, in the July 7, 1989 judgment of Soering v. United Kingdom, that the respondent State was barred from extraditing the petitioner (a German national) to the United States, due to the possibility of being sentenced to the death penalty and subjected to the “intense and prolonged suffering” of awaiting execution (the socalled “death row phenomenon”); therefore, if he is extradited to the United States, the Court added, the United Kingdom would incur a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, due to the “real risk” of “inhuman treatment,” which is understood, within the context of the jurisprudential interpretation of Article 3, as treatment that “deliberately causes serious physical or mental suffering.” 31 28. The European Court, in declaring that the European Convention is a “living instrument” to be interpreted in light of contemporary conditions, took into account the evolution of national criminal systems of States Parties to the Convention towards the de facto abolition of the death penalty, as reflected in Protocol No. 6 (of 1983) of the European Convention, which revealed a virtual consensus that, due to the changing times, the death penalty was no longer consistent with “regional standards of justice.” 32 Under the circumstances – as, inter alia, with a case of extradition, an example of cas d’espèce – in which the death penalty could pose an issue under Article 3 of the European Convention (inhuman or degrading punishment), the Court stated the following: The manner in which it [a death sentence] is imposed or executed, the personal circumstances of the condemned person and a disproportionality to the gravity of the crime committed, as well as the conditions of detention awaiting execution, are examples of factors capable of bringing the treatment of punishment received by the condemned person within the proscription under Article 3. (para. 104) 29. In the Soering Case, the European Court indicated the circumstances in which the imposition of the death penalty (or its probability) could bring about a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention (prohibiting inhuman or degrading 30 A. Camus, “Réflexions sur la guillotine,” in A. Camus y A.A. Koestler, Réflexions sur la peine capitale, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1979 (reprinted 1997), pp. 140-141, 143 and 146 (Translation by the Secretariat of the Court). 31 European Court of Human Rights, Soering v. United Kingdom case, Judgment of 07/07/1989, Strasbourg, Council of Europe, pp.1-42, esp. paras. 88-92, 99, 104, 106, 109 and 111. 32 Id. at p. 31, para. 102.