There are no specific admissibility criteria and any individual or a group on behalf of an individual may send the letter. There is no need to exhaust domestic remedies nor is it necessary that the State concerned has signed or ratified any treaty or convention. Sending a communication to a Special Rapporteur does not prevent a person from sending a communication of the same case to any other treaty body mechanism at any time. 201 Upon receipt of a letter of allegation, the special rapporteur will consider it and if considered credible, forward it to the concerned government for a response. The government may or may not respond to the letter. The fact of the complaint and the response from the government, if any, is published in a combined report produced by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights secretariat each year. Complainants are encouraged to send updates on the allegation if the situation changes. The special procedures may be effective in case of an imminent threat or danger to the lives of people. An urgent appeal may be sent to the special rapporteur, on which they take action and forward the allegation letter to the concerned government in a matter of days. In short, the special procedures are not bound by the framework, criteria or rules of the treaty body mechanisms and as such do not suffer from the limitations of the treaty bodies. However, the special procedures have their own limitations. The process of the special procedures is not usually public and the mandate holder does not make a decision or a determination at the end of the process (except in the case of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which has a different procedure). As such, the special procedures are mechanisms that make recommendations to and exert pressure on the government to stop violations and respond to them. However, they cannot themselves provide redress to individual victims. The country-specific mandate holders do not have a ‘communications’ procedure but they may nevertheless be useful to inform of communications specific to that country. A list with useful links on special procedures is attached as annexure 5A. Guidance on sending Urgent Appeals and Letter of Allegations to the Special Rapporteur is available at: http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/SP/LeafletCommunications_en.pdf. 201 Although this may not be the case with respect to the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which, unlike other special procedures, uses a quasi-judicial adversarial procedure in relation to individual communications. 54 INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS TREATIES | REDRESS