Who can take a case to the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) and on which conditions? What should be previously done and which requirements fulfilled?

There is two main procedure for bringing complaints of violations of the provisions of ICCPR before the Human Rights Committee: Individual communications and Interstate (state-to-state) complaints.

Article 41-43 of ICCPR set out a procedure for the interstate complaints. Interstate communication presuppose a special declaration to be made by the two states, the applicant as well as the respondent state. States must recognize the competence of the Committee. No communication shall be received by the Committee if it concerns a State Party which has not made such declaration.

Legal basis for individual communication is given in an additional instrument of CCPR, in “Optional Protocol to the CCPR”, which means, that Optional Protocol should be separately ratified by the State to give its own citizens possibility to take claims in the Human Rights Committee. In Article 2 of optional protocol is stated, that subject to the protocol are “individuals who claim that any of their rights enumerated in the Covenant have been violated” and also article defines a circumstance, when can individual submit the case to the Committee:” The individual has exhausted all available domestic remedies.” But there is one exception to this rule, particularly, individual can bring the case to the committee without the exhaustion of the domestic remedies, if s/he can justify, that the application of the remedies is unreasonably prolonged in domestic level