3. ADMISSIBILITY AND EXHAUSTION OF DOMESTIC REMEDIES 3.1 Admissibility To access remedies beyond national borders, certain basic requirements need to be fulfilled for the application or the petition to be declared admissible. The admissibility requirements for complaints from individuals under most regional and international human rights mechanisms are more or less the same. There are exceptions or differences, which are discussed under the respective mechanism in sections below. Accordingly, an individual complaint may be declared inadmissible on the following grounds:  The application is anonymous.  The applicant is not the victim and has not obtained authorisation from the victim or the victim’s family to make a complaint.  The application is about events which occurred before the treaty (and the individual complaints procedure tied to it) entered into force for the State concerned. For example, under Article 27 of the Convention Against Torture, that convention comes into force (becomes applicable) 30 days after a State has ratified it. This means that if State X ratifies the convention (and accepts the individual complaint procedure) on 31 March 2000, it will come into force for that State on 30 April 2000. The Committee Against Torture can then only examine complaints which are about events which occurred on or after 30 April 2000 (or, in certain circumstances, violations which took place earlier but can be classified as ‘continuing violations’, with continuing impact beyond 30 April 2000).  The time-limit for submission of an application has expired. As a general rule, the timelimit begins to run from the time a final official decision is taken in the case. This could mean the date of the incident where no remedy has been sought (but see below for exhaustion of domestic remedies), but in general it will mean the date of a decision not to prosecute, a court judgment, the lodging of a petition by the victim to which no response has been received, or some other such decision which represents the final step in the process of seeking a remedy within the domestic system.  The communication is incompatible with the provisions of the relevant convention.  The application is considered manifestly ill-founded or an abuse of the right of submission. This is the only ground of inadmissibility on which the body concerned can refer to the facts of a case. It is assessed on a case-by-case basis, and is applied where it is considered that the facts could not possibly reveal the violation alleged, therefore being clearly an allegation without any basis for which the right of submission should not have been used.  The facts of the case have already been examined under this or another procedure of international settlement.  Domestic remedies have not been exhausted.43 43 This highlighted section is taken from: The Torture Reporting Handbook, Human Rights Centre, University of Essex, Colchester, 2000, p. 79. REDRESS | ADMISSIBILITY AND EXHAUSTION OF DOMESTIC REMEDIES 15