• freedom from slavery and servitude respectively (Article 8, paras 1 and 2); • imprisonment for breach of contract (Article 11); • prohibition on retrospective laws (Article 15); • right to recognition as a person (Article 16); • freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Article 18). Several of the rights expressed above are customary norms of international law (including the prohibition on torture) and could not be derogated from in any event. States that have not ratified the ICCPR are nonetheless bound by these customary norms. As noted above, there are other rights not set out in the above list that have also become customary norms and these also cannot be departed from by any State.116 The Human Rights Committee in its General Comment 29, States of Emergency (Article 4) (2001) sets out two fundamental conditions that must be met before States may invoke the power to derogate contained in Article 4: 1. the situation must amount to a public emergency which threatens the life of the nation; and 2. the State Party must have officially proclaimed a state of emergency.117 The situation that gives rise to the state of emergency must be ‘of an exceptional and temporary nature.’118 As the General Comment explains, 115 ‘Not every disturbance or See also Concluding Observations: Egypt CCPR/CO/76/EGY/Add.1, para 4 (2002); Concluding Observations: Israel CCPR/C/79/Add.93, paras 19, 21 (1998); Report of the Committee against TortureA/52/44, para 258 (1997). 116 The Human Rights Committee in General Comment 29, para 11, stresses that States may, in no circumstances, invoke Article 4 of the ICCPR as justification of action in violation of humanitarian law or peremptory norms of international law, for example, by taking hostages, by imposing collective punishments, through arbitrary deprivations of liberty or by deviating from fundamental principles of a fair trial including the presumption of innocence. The Human Rights Committee also takes the position that judicial oversight may be inferred to be non-derogable taking into account other provisions of international law. 117 Para 2, General Comment 29. See also the United Nations, Economic and Social Council, UN SubCommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation of Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Annex, UN Doc E/CN.4/1985/4 (1985) (Siracusa Principles). The Siracusa Principles arose out of a meeting of 31 international law experts, convened by the International Commission of Jurists, the International Association of Penal law, the American Association for the International Commission of Jurists, the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights and the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Sciences, who met in Siracusa, Sicily, for a week in spring 1984 to consider the limitation and derogation provisions of the ICCPR. 118 Para 2, General Comment 29. 65