The requirement to exhaust local remedies is one of the conditions recognized under the rules of international law before submitting a complaint to a human rights body, whether international or regional, that has the jurisdiction to receive complaints in which a state party to the relevant human rights convention allegedly violates one of the rights stipulated in that convention. Although a number of human rights instruments explicitly recognize cases in which the complainant is exempted from exhausting local remedies when such remedies are not available, effective or unduly prolonged, these instruments have not addressed cases in which the application of the requirement to exhaust local remedies is excluded. However, the jurisprudence of international human rights bodies has settled on the existence of a number of such cases in which the complainant is not required to even attempt to exhaust the remedies. These cases are: the existence of legislative measures or administrative practices that are inconsistent with the convention in question, the continuation of the situation to which the complainant is subjected, and the defendant state’s waiver of the requirement to exhaust local remedies, whether the waiver is explicit or implicit. Some add to these cases the case in which the defendant state commits human rights violations outside its national territory. This study examines these cases in the light of the jurisprudence of the international and regional human rights bodies and concludes that cases of non-application of the requirement of exhaustion of local remedies are distinct from exceptions to this requirement.
Shamdeen et al. (Sun,) studied this question.