information contained in the complainant’s submission and may be reviewed, at the initiative of
the State party, in the light of information and comments received from the State party and any
further comments, if any, from the complainant. Some States parties have adopted 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 and pertinent information which was not available to him when he took his initial
decision on interim measures.
70. The Committee has 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. 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 its merits for it to be concluded that the alleged victim would suffer
irreparable harm in the event of his or her deportation.
71. The Committee is aware that a number of States parties have expressed concern that
interim measures of protection have been requested in too large a number of cases, especially
where the complainant’s deportation is alleged to be imminent, and that there are insufficient
factual elements to warrant a request for interim measures. The Committee takes such
expressions of concern seriously and is prepared to discuss them with the States parties
concerned. In this regard it wishes to point out that in many cases, requests for interim measures
are lifted by the Special Rapporteur, on the basis of pertinent State party information received
that obviates the need for interim measures.
C. Progress of work
72. At the time of adoption of the present report the Committee had registered,
since 1989, 316 complaints with respect to 25 countries. Of them, 89 complaints had been
discontinued and 55 had been declared inadmissible. The Committee had adopted final decisions
on the merits of 142 complaints and found violations of the Convention in 42 of them.
Thirty-one complaints were pending consideration.
73. At its thirty-seventh session, the Committee declared inadmissible complaints
Nos. 284/2006 (R.S.A.N. v. Canada) and 288/2006 (H.S.T. v. Norway). Both complaints
concerned claims under article 3 of the Convention. The Committee declared them
inadmissible, respectively, for non-exhaustion of domestic remedies and for being manifestly
unfounded. The text of these decisions is reproduced in annex VII, section B, to the present
report.
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