APPENDIX I Individual opinion: submitted by Mr. Bertil Wennergren pursuant to rule 92, paragraph 3, of the Committee's rules of procedure concerning the Committee' s decision to declare communication No. 220/1987 inadmissible As stated in paragraph 8.2 of the Committee's decision, article 5, paragraph 2 (b), of the Optional Protocol precludes the Committee from considering any commu-nication by an individual who has failed to exhaust all available domestic remedies. However, in accordance with recognized rules of international law and established jurisprudence of the Committee, domestic remedies need not be exhausted if they objectively have no prospect of success. In my view, a remedy cannot be deemed to be effective if, under substantive national legislation, the claim would inevitably be dismissed by the courts. Pursuant to article 2 of the Constitution of the French Republic, France shall ensure equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race and religion. Of relevance in this context is that among the prohibited grounds for distinction, this provision does not include "language", as does article 26 of the Covenant. In an earlier case concerning the right to use the Breton language (C. L. D. v. France, 228/1987), it was brought to the attention of the Committee that the Tribunal Administratif de Rennes, by decision of 21 November 1984, had ruled as follows: "Bearing in mind that in the absence of legal provisions determining otherwise, the procedural language before French tribunals is the French language, the document which was not submitted in the French language and signed by M. Q. was wrongly registered as a complaint by the tribunal's registrar." As the document had neither then nor later been translated, the Tribunal found that it could not be considered. Q's appeal to the Conseil d'Etat was rejected on 22 November 1985, because it had not been written in the French language and therefore was found to be inadmissible. A commentary on this case (Recueil Dalloz Sirey (1986), p. 71) indicates that the Conseil d'Etat thereby established a general procedural rule, according to which complaints to administrative courts must be submitted in French. Taking that precedent into account in the light of the contents of article 2 of the French Constitution, it follows that the remedies referred to by the State party cannot be deemed to be effective. In my opinion, the communication should have been declared admissible insofar as it may raise issues under article 26 of the Covenant. APPENDIX II Individual opinion: submitted by Mrs. Rosalyn Higgins pursuant to rule 92, paragraph 3, of the Committee's rules of procedure concerning the Committee's decision to declare communication No. 220/1987 inadmissible I agree with the decision of the Committee insofar as it refers to a remaining requirement that local remedies be exhausted in respect of the claim under article 26. The Conseil d'Etat has not actually ruled on the substantive issue; rather it has decided that it will not do so unless the issue is brought before it through an application itself in the French language. The authors, being perfectly able to use French, could seek through a French language application a definitive ruling on the use of the Breton language in administrative tribunal proceedings. While this might be unpalatable to the authors, no legal harm would be done to their cause by adopting this course of action. However, I am not able to agree with the findings of the Committee that it is precluded by the French declaration of 4 November 1980 from examining the author's claim as it relates to article 27 of the Covenant. The fact that the Covenant does not itself make the distinction between reservations and declarations does not mean that no distinction between these concepts exists, so far as the Covenant is concerned. Nor, in my view, is the matter disposed of by invoking article 2 (1) (a) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which emphasizes that intent, rather than nomenclature, is the key. An examination of the notification of 4 January 1982 shows that the Government of the Republic of France was engaged in two tasks: listing certain reservations and entering certain interpretative declarations. Thus in relation to article 4 (1), 9, 14 and 19, it uses the phrase "enters a reservation". In other paragraphs, it declares how terms of the Covenant are, in its views, to be understood in relation to the French Constitution, French legislation, or obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. To note, by reference to article 2 (1) (d) of the Vienna Convention, that it does not matter how a reservation is phrased or named, cannot serve to turn these interpretative declarations into reservations. Their content is clearly that of declarations. Further, the French notification shows that deliberately different language was selected to serve different legal purposes. There is no reason to suppose that the contrasting use, in different paragraphs, of the phrase "reservation" and "declaration" was not entirely deliberate, with its legal consequence well understood by the Government of the Republic. 46