Seeking Remedies for Torture Victims: A Handbook on the Individual Complaints Procedures of the UN Tready Bodies on Human Rights (ECHR).190 These reservations generally aim to prevent the UN treaty bodies being used to “appeal” European Court of Human Rights decisions and, ultimately, to avoid the existence of diverging jurisprudence from different international bodies on the same case.191 The notion of “examination”, that is, how the HRC and the CAT Committee have construed its meaning and scope is therefore important. From the case law of the HRC, it appears that not any examination will constitute an obstacle to the admissibility of a communication under the OP: if the case has been considered or dismissed exclusively on procedural grounds, the HRC will not deem it as having been already “examined”; hence, the case will be admissible. The case is, however, inadmissible and the reservation would take effect if there was a minimum consideration of the merits of the case.192 In Gálvez v. Spain, regarding a previous application on the same matter rejected by the former European Commission on Human Rights, it stated: The Committee has noted that the author’s complaint concerning article 14, paragraph 1, of the Covenant had already been submitted to the European Commission of Human Rights, which declared it inadmissible for non-exhaustion of domestic remedies on 29 May 1991. The Committee notes, however, that the European Commission did not examine the case within the meaning of article 5, paragraph 2 (a) of the Optional Protocol, since its decision was solely based on procedural grounds and it did not involve any consideration of the merits of the case. Therefore, no issue arises with regard to article 5, paragraph 2 (a) of the Optional Protocol as modified by the State party’s reservation to this provision.193 More recently, in Achabal Puertas v. Spain, the HRC seems to have further clarified the contours of the requirement “examination” as set out in the reservations, by stating that a succinct or limited examination of the merits under another international procedure might not suffice to consider that the same matter has been examined. In that case, considering the fact that the author had presented an application on the same events before the European Court of Human Rights, which was declared inadmissible as manifestly ill-founded, the HRC came to the following conclusion: It must be considered that the European Court has gone well beyond the examination of the purely formal criteria of admissibility when it declares a case inadmissible because ‘it does not reveal any violation of the rights and freedoms established in 190 See list of reservations to the Optional Protocol, available at: https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ ParticipationStatus.aspx. 191 See, for instance, State party’s observations in HRC, Pauger v. Austria, Comm. No. 716/1996, para. 4.2. See also Ghandi, P.R., The Human Rights Committee and the Right of Individual Communication, Ashgate (1998), p. 228. 192 See, inter alia, HRC, Pauger v. Austria, Comm. No. 716/1996, para. 6.4; HRC, Mahabir v. Austria, Comm. No. 944/2000, paras. 8.3 and 8.4. 193 HRC, Gálvez v. Spain, Comm. No. 1389/2005, para. 4.3. 74