13 36. The learned author added that one must ask himself what punishment signifies for those in charge of imposing it and carrying it out, and for society as a whole, as the imposition of inhuman punishments could fracture the values that it espouses. (…) The death penalty, as with other corporal punishments, (…) is reprehensible from the human point of the view to the extent that it is degrading to man by virtue of being a purely corporal punishment. (…) In the history of the Law, landmark changes have always been initiated, more than any other factor in legal thought, by the transformations experienced in the image of man as conceived of by the law-maker. (…) Every legal system must necessarily detach itself from the general image, from a kind of average man. (…) The respect of subjective rights is almost as important for the legal system as the fulfilment of legal duties. 50 37. It has already been established that the history of punishment is equally “horrendous and infamous to humanity” as the history of crime itself; as with crime, certain punishments are “cruel,” and engender additional violence, being that “the violence inflicted by punishment is always planned, conscious, organized by the many against one.” It also may be deemed that [h]umankind has paid for the conglomeration of punishments that have been threatened throughout history in blood, lives and suffering that is immeasurably greater than that produced by the sum of all crimes. (…) If the history of punishment is shameful, then the history of legal and philosophical thought on the issue of punishment is no less shameful, (…) for never having seriously spoken out against the inhumanity of certain punishments until the Age of Enlightenment. (…) 51 If the debate over punishment was driven by principles, founded on the societal conviction of the unconditional inviolability of human life, and not simply utilitarian, 52 perhaps the universal legal conscience would have already have taken a definitive stand through the complete abolition of all corporal punishment, of which the death penalty constitutes a historical relic or remnant. 53 III. Epilogue: Pacta Sunt Servanda 38. The fact that Trinidad and Tobago denounced the American Convention on Human Rights and is no longer a Party could not be invoked by the respondent State in order to evade the duty to faithfully comply with the present Judgment of the Inter-American Court. In the case of D.R. Thomas and H. Hilaire (Appeal No. 60 of 1998) the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council held on January 1, 1999, inter alia, that, upon the ratification of the American Convention, which “provides for individual 50 Ibid, p.156. For the author, the death penalty historically was the “end point” of a series of punishments, particularly corporal punishments (including the punishment of mutilation), and today is a requirement of these punishments, which “is separated from other forms of punishment by an insurmountable abyss”; G. Radbruch, Introducão à Ciência do Direito, São Paolo, Martins Fontes, 1999; pp. 111-112. (Translation by the Secretariat of the Court) 51 L. Ferrajoli, Derecho y Razón…, op. cit. supra n. ( ), pp. 385-387 (Translation by the Secretariat of the Court). 52 Rather, on one side, with the defenders of the death penalty invoking arguments concerning the theory of retribution, or intimidation, or social defense or “the idea of society as an organism that should amputate the injured limb;” and, on the other side, the critics of the death penalty invoking its inefficacy as a deterrent, or the “absence of benefit” derived from its application, or its irreversible nature, or its “anti-educative” effect;” ibid, p. 387. 53 Cf. ibid, pp. 390-411.