are faced with a situation in which their claims are not justiciable, given that the French Government has abolished the indigenous tribunals which it had agreed to maintain in the Treaty of 1881. The same argument is said to apply to the possibility of cassation: as the authors were not parties to the procedure before the Court of Appeal of Papeete of 29 April 1993, they could not apply for cassation to the Court of Cassation. Even assuming that they would have had the possibility of appealing to the Court of Cassation, they argue, this would not have been an effective remedy, since that court could only have concluded that the tribunals seized of the land dispute had no competence in the matter. appropriate judicial forum for the complainant rather, the right to access to a tribunal must be understood as a right to access to the tribunal competent to adjudicate a given dispute. 5.10 As to the claims under articles 17 and 23, paragraph 1, the State party recalls that not even the authors claim that the skeletons discovered on the disputed grounds belong to their respective families or their relatives, but rather to their "ancestors" in the broadest sense of the term. To subsume the remains from a grave, however old and unidentifiable they are, under the notion of "family", would be an abusively extensive and unpracticable interpretation of the term. 6.5 The authors reconfirm that only the indigenous tribunals remain competent to adjudicate land disputes in French Polynesia. Rather than refuting this conclusion, the declarations of 29 September 1887 are said to confirm it, since they stipulate that the indigenous tribunals were to be abolished once the disputes for which they had been established had been settled (“Les Tribunaux indigènes, dont le maintien avait été stipulé à l'acte d'annexion de Tahiti à la France, seront supprimés dès que les opérations relatives à la délimitation de la propriété auxquelles elles donnent lieu auront été vidées”). The authors question the validity of the declarations of 29 December 1887 and add that as land disputes continue to exist in Tahiti, a fact conceded by the State party itself (paragraph 5.9 above), it must be assumed that the indigenous tribunals remain competent to adjudicate them. Only thus can it be explained that the Haute Cour de Tahiti continued to hand down judgments in these disputes until 1934. Authors' comments 6.1 In their comments, the authors refute the State party's argument that effective domestic remedies remain available to them. They request that the Committee dismiss the State party's challenge to the admissibility of the communication as belated. 6.2 The authors reiterate that they are not invoking a right to property but the right to access to a tribunal and their right to a private and family life. They therefore reject the State party's argument related to inadmissibility ratione materiae and add that their rights were violated at the time of submission of their communication, i.e. in June 1993 and after the entry into force of the Covenant and the Optional Protocol for France. 6.3 The authors submit that they must be regarded as "victims" within the meaning of article 1 of the Optional Protocol, since they consider that they have the right to be heard before the indigenous tribunal competent for land disputes in French Polynesia, a right denied to them by the State party. They contend that the State party is estopped from criticizing them for not having invoked their right to property or a right to occupancy of the disputed grounds when precisely their access to the indigenous tribunal competent for adjudication of such disputes was impossible. Similarly, they consider themselves to be "victims" in respect of claims under articles 17 and 23 (1), arguing that it would have been for the courts and not the French Government to prove the existence or absence of family or ancestral links between the human remains discovered on the disputed site and the authors respectively their families. Post - admissibility considerations 7.1 During its 55th session, the Committee further examined the communication, and took note of the State party’s request that the decision on admissibility be reviewed pursuant to rule 93, paragraph 4, of the rules of procedure. It took note of the State party’s argument that the Government had not filed its admissibility observations in time because of the complexity of the case and the short deadlines imparted to the State party; it observed, however, that the Government had not reacted to three reminders and that it had taken the State party 16 months, instead of two, to reply to the admissibility of the authors’ claims, and that the State party’s first submission had been made three months after the adoption of the decision on admissibility. The Committee considered that as there had been no submissions from the State party by the time of the adoption of the decision on admissibility, it had to rely on the authors’ information; furthermore, silence on the part of the State party militated in favour of concluding that the 6.4 On the requirement of exhaustion of domestic remedies, the authors recall that they were not parties to the procedure between the Société hôtelière RIVNAC and the Association IA ORA O NU'UROA; not being parties to the proceedings, they were not in the position to raise the question of the tribunal's competence. They reiterate that they 71