Trinidad and Tobago party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) Ratified the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR (allows individual complaints to UN Human Rights Committee) and then denounced it (i.e. withdrew) after a series of cases against it, especially on use of the death penalty. Re-acceded to the Optional Protocol in 1998 with a reservation: '[T]he Human Rights Committee shall not be competent to receive and consider communications relating to any prisoner who is under sentence of death in respect of any matter relating to his prosecution, his detention, his trial, his conviction, his sentence or the carrying out of the death sentence on him and any matter connected therewith'. Why did the Human Rights Committee consider that the reservation is against the objects and purposes of the Optional Protocol? Who decides: parties or treaty monitoring body?