The admissibility of the complaint

Before the Committee can consider a complaint on its merits or substance, it must be satisfied that the formal requirements of admissibility are met. When examining admissibility, the Committee may consider one or several of the following factors:

1. If the complainant acts on behalf of another person, has he/she obtained sufficient authorization or has he/she otherwise justified the reasons in doing so?
2. Is the complainant (or the person on whose behalf the complaint is brought) a victim of the alleged violation? It has to be shown that the alleged victim is personally and directly affected by the law, policy, practice, act or omission of the State party which constitute the object of the complaint. It is not sufficient simply to challenge a law or State policy or practice in the abstract without demonstrating how the alleged victim is individually affected;
3. Is the complaint compatible with the provisions of the treaty invoked? The alleged violation must relate to a right actually protected by the treaty.
4. Is the Committee in question required to review the facts and evidence in a case already decided by national courts? The Committees are competent to consider possible violations of the rights guaranteed by the treaties concerned, but are not competent to act as an appellate instance with respect to national courts and tribunals. Thus, the Committees cannot in principle examine the determination of administrative, civil or criminal liability of individuals, nor can they review the question of innocence or guilt;
5. Is the complaint sufficiently substantiated? If the relevant Committee considers, in the light of the information before it, that the complainant has not sufficiently presented/ described the facts and arguments for a violation of the Covenant, it may reject the case as insufficiently substantiated, and thus inadmissible;
6. Does the complaint relate to events that occurred after the entry into force of the complaint mechanism for the State party concerned? As a rule, a Committee does not examine complaints where the facts occurred prior to this date. There are, however, exceptions to this rule, for instance in cases where the effects of the event in question result in a continuous violation of the treaty;
7. Has the same matter been submitted to another international body? If it has been submitted to another treaty body or to a regional mechanism the Committees cannot examine the complaint.
8. Have all domestic remedies been exhausted? A cardinal principle governing the admissibility of a complaint is that the complainant must have exhausted all relevant remedies that are available in the State party before bringing a claim to a Committee. This usually includes pursuing the claim through the local court system.
9. The mere doubts about the effectiveness of a remedy do not, in the Committees’ view, dispense with the obligation to exhaust it. There are, however, exceptions to this rule, when proceedings at the national level have been unreasonably prolonged, or the remedies are unavailable or would plainly be ineffective. The complainant should, however, give detailed reasons why the general rule should not apply. On the issue of exhaustion of domestic remedies, the complainant should describe in his/her initial submission the efforts he/she has made to exhaust local remedies, specifying the claims advanced before the national authorities and the dates and outcome of the proceedings, or alternatively stating why any exception should apply;
10. Is the complaint precluded by a reservation made by the State to the treaty in question? Reservations are formal statements by which States limit the obligations that they accept under a particular provision of a treaty. A State may have entered a substantive reservation to the treaty or a procedural reservation to the complaint mechanism limiting the Committee’s competence to examine certain complaints.
11. Is the complaint an abuse of the procedure? In some cases, the Committees may consider the claims to be frivolous, vexatious or otherwise inappropriate use of the complaint procedure and reject them as inadmissible, for example if the same individual brings repeated claims to the Committee on the same issue when the previous identical ones have already been dismissed.