G. Receivability and admissibility

The Optional Protocol sets out strict admissibility criteria (arts. 1–2), which must be met before the Committee can decide on the merits. Article 1 sets out the basic requirements that a communication must meet for the Committee to receive and consider it. If these requirements are clearly not met, the Committee's secretariat cannot register the communication and it does not even get to the admissibility stage. The Committee might have to consider some of these criteria itself at the stage of admissibility, if they were not clear at the registration stage. These criteria are set out here in question form:

Article 2 sets out the requirements for admissibility. These apply to those communications that are registered and that the Committee considers. As noted above, the Committee could decide that the communication does not meet the admissibility requirements after all and so there is no need to consider its merits.

Having exhausted domestic remedies is a key admissibility criterion under the Optional Protocol. For this reason, it is important for authors to include as much information as possible in their submissions on how they have exhausted domestic remedies. As noted above, the submission can indicate the type of action taken, the authority to which it was addressed, when the action was taken, the final decision and so on. The Committee has also asked why domestic remedies were not exhausted. Indeed, according to article 2 (d), this requirement can be waived in some cases: where the application of the remedy is unreasonably prolonged or unlikely to bring effective relief. This mirrors developments in other areas of international law. For example, the European Court of Human Rights requires domestic remedies to have been exhausted where remedies are “available” and “effective”. The inter-American system has identified three exceptions to the rule: (1) the domestic legislation of the State does not afford due process of law for this rule; (2) the party alleging violation of rights has been denied access to remedies under domestic law or has been prevented from exhausting them; (3) there has been unwarranted delay in rendering a final judgement under the aforementioned remedies.