Universal-Womens-accesss-to-justice-Publications-Practitioners-Guide-Series-2016-ENG

296 PRACTITIONERS GUIDE No. 12
individuals. 734 The provisions will not change in the new Statute
of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights. 735
2. Admissibility requirements
Admissibility requirements must be fulfilled before a complaint
is examined on the merits. They are contained in the human
rights treaty establishing the competence of the human rights
body to hear individual or collective complaints. Generally,
these requirements are very similar for all human rights bodies
and, even when some are not specifically provided for in the
treaty, they are usually upheld by the competent human rights
body on the basis of the uniform interpretation of international
human rights law. As for the Inter-American Court of Human
Rights and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights,
since these bodies do not hear individual complaints directly,
the admissibility criteria are the same as those of their lower
bodies, the IACHR and the ACHPR.
a) Exhaustion of domestic remedies
It is a general standard of international human rights law that,
before bringing a case before an international legal mechanism,
an applicant must have first exhausted the domestic remedies
available. The rationale of the principle lies in the fact that, as
it is the international responsibility of the State as a whole that
is challenged, the State must have had the possibility to
redress that human rights violation domestically, before an
international forum should be made available. However, only
those remedies that are effective need to be exhausted. If
734
Article 33, Interim Rules of the Court, done at Arusha, Tanzania, 20
June 2008, entered into force on 20 June 2008 (ACtHPR Rules of
Procedure).
735
Article 30, Protocol on the Statute of the African Court of Justice
and Human Rights, adopted by the 11 th Ordinary Session of the
Assembly of the African Union in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, 1 July 2008
(not yet in force) (ACJHR Statute).