Seeking Remedies for Torture Victims: A Handbook on the Individual Complaints Procedures of the UN Tready Bodies venues prescribed within the relevant State to gain a remedy which is designed to bring effective and sufficient redress. Thereafter, the burden of proof shifts to the State party, which needs to provide reasons contesting the claims raised by the author at the admissibility stage.118 In Osmani v. Serbia, the author had two different procedures available to seek redress: criminal proceedings and a civil action for damages. The author had exhausted only the first of them without obtaining relief and, on this basis, the State party claimed that the case was inadmissible because the author should have exhausted the second one as well. The CAT Committee ascertained that “having unsuccessfully exhausted one remedy one should not be required to exhaust alternative legal avenues that would have been directed essentially to the same end and would in any case not have offered better chances of success”.119 Sometimes no remedy is available. For example, it may be that certain human rights violations are explicitly authorized by a State’s law, and that the law cannot be challenged for any reason in a court. For example, a person is not required to appeal an action if it is clearly not authorized by domestic legislation and if there is no avenue to challenge the domestic validity of that legislation. It may be that domestic remedies are not exhausted at the time of the submission of a complaint, but are exhausted by the time the admissibility of the complaint is actually considered by the relevant Committee. In this situation, the Committee will almost always decide that Article 5(2)(b) has been satisfied. There is little point in deeming such a complaint inadmissible on the basis of Article 5(2)(b), as the complainant can simply resubmit an identical complaint.120 If a complaint is deemed to be inadmissible as domestic remedies were not exhausted, the complaint may be resubmitted if available domestic remedies are subsequently exhausted without satisfaction. It needs to be pointed out that often, in cases involving torture and ill-treatment, some aspects of the examination on the admissibility will be closely linked to the examination on the merits. This is particularly the case when the assessment of possible exceptions to the rule requiring the exhaustion of domestic remedies entails an appraisal of the effectiveness of the remedy offered by the State party, which will be more appropriately carried out when looking into the merits under the duty to investigate (see Sections 3.2.16 and 4.7.2 for the duty to investigate). 118 HRC, Njaru v. Cameroon, Comm. No. 1353/2005, para. 5.2. 119 CAT Committee, Osmani v. Serbia, Comm. No. 261/2005, para. 7.1. 120 An exception arose in HRC, Kuok Koi v. Portugal, Comm. No. 925/2000, due to the unusual circumstance of the relevant territory, Macao, changing hands from Portugal to China while the complaint was being heard. 60