the practice of systematically requesting the Rapporteur to withdraw his request for interim measures of protection. The Rapporteur has taken the position that such requests need only be addressed if based on new information which was not available to him when he took his initial decision on interim measures. 135. Also during the period under review, the Committee conceptualized the formal and substantive criteria applied by the Rapporteur for new complaints and interim measures in granting or rejecting requests for interim measures of protection (see CAT/NONE/2004/1/Rev.1). Apart from timely submission of a complainant’s request for interim measures of protection under rule 108, paragraph 1, of the Committee’s rules of procedure, the basic admissibility criteria set out in article 22, paragraphs 1 to 5, of the Convention, must be met by the complainant for the Rapporteur to act on his or her request. The requirement of exhaustion of domestic remedies can be dispensed with, if the only remedies available to the complainant are without suspensive effect, i.e. remedies that do not automatically stay the execution of an expulsion order, or if there is a risk of immediate deportation of the complainant after the final rejection of his or her asylum application. In such cases, the Rapporteur may request the State party to refrain from deporting a complainant, while his or her complaint is under consideration by the Committee, even before domestic remedies have been exhausted. As for substantive criteria to be applied by the Rapporteur, a complaint must have a substantial likelihood of success on the merits for it to be concluded that the alleged victim would suffer irreparable harm in the event of his or her deportation. C. Progress of work 136. At the time of adoption of the present report the Committee had registered 269 complaints with respect to 24 countries. Of them, 69 complaints had been discontinued and 47 had been declared inadmissible. The Committee had adopted final decisions on the merits with respect to 111 complaints and found violations of the Convention in 32 of them. Overall, 42 complaints remained pending for consideration. 137. At its thirty-third session, the Committee declared inadmissible complaints Nos. 163/2000 (S.V. v. Canada) and 218/2002 (R.C. v. Sweden). 138. Also at its thirty-third session, the Committee adopted decisions on the merits in respect of complaints Nos. 133/1999 (Falcon Ríos v. Canada), 207/2002 (Dimitrijevic v. Serbia and Montenegro) and 223/2002 (Sohab Uddin v. Sweden). The text of these decisions is reproduced in annex VIII, section A, to the present report. 139. In its decision on complaint No. 223/2002 (S.U.A. v. Sweden), the Committee considered that the complainant’s expulsion to Bangladesh would not violate article 3 of the Convention, in the absence of a foreseeable, real and personal risk of being tortured upon return to that country. 140. In case No. 133/1999 (Falcon Ríos v. Canada), the complainant claimed that his expulsion to Mexico would expose him to a risk of torture, since he and his father had been tortured and his mother and older sister had been raped by Mexican soldiers because of his uncle’s suspected links with the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). The Committee declared the complaint admissible, even though the complainant had not applied to the Federal Court for leave to appeal the Minister’s decision not to grant a stay of his removal on humanitarian grounds. It argued that since an application on humanitarian grounds is not an 54

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