CCPR/C/123/D/2747/2016 4.9 In the second situation, if the European Court of Human Rights has rejected an application that it considers manifestly ill-founded, then it must have carried out an examination of the claims put forward by the applicants, which means that it has reviewed the merits of the case. That too would leave the Committee without jurisdiction, because of the reservation filed by France. 4.10 The argument that the case in question is not the same case cannot be accepted. The application relates to the same facts and the same circumstances as that submitted to the European Court of Human Rights. What is more, the issues raised are the same. In conclusion, the Committee should declare the communication inadmissible. Author’s comments on the State party’s observations on admissibility 5.1 On 20 July 2016, the author stated that she had no further comments to make, having developed at length the legal argument for admissibility in her initial communication. 5.2 She noted, however, the cynicism of the State party, which, while emphasizing that the disadvantage was significant within the meaning of article 35 of the European Convention on Human Rights, requested the Committee not to consider the merits of the complaint, while the author had already been the victim of a denial of justice before the European Court of Human Rights and the French Court of Cassation. Decision of the Committee on admissibility 6.1 On 26 July 2017, the Committee considered the admissibility of the communication. 6.2 The Committee observed that the author had presented an application relating to the same events before the European Court of Human Rights, and that she had been informed by a letter of 11 September 2014 that a single judge had decided to declare “the application inadmissible on the grounds that the conditions of admissibility laid down in articles 34 and 35 of the Convention had not been met”. The Committee recalled that, in ratifying the Optional Protocol, France had introduced a reservation excluding the competence of the Committee in relation to cases that had been or were being examined under another procedure of international investigation or settlement. However, the Committee noted from the letter from the Court that the author’s application appeared not to have been declared inadmissible on purely procedural grounds and that, from the succinct nature of the reasoning by the Court, no argument or clarification regarding the inadmissibility decision had apparently been provided to the author to justify a rejection of the application based on the merits. Consequently, the Committee considered that it was not possible for it to determine with certainty that the case presented by the author had already been the subject of a consideration, even limited, of the merits, 13 in the meaning of the reservation filed by France. For those reasons, the Committee considered that the reservation entered by France relating to article 5 (2) of the Optional Protocol was not, in itself, an obstacle to the consideration of the merits by the Committee. 6.3 With regard to the requirement for the exhaustion of domestic remedies established by article 5 (2) (b) of the Optional Protocol, the Committee noted that the author for the first time had raised the substantive complaint of violation of her rights, currently invoked before the Committee, only during the application before the criminal chamber of the Court of Cassation, which found the grounds inadmissible owing to the fact that they should have been invoked before the lower court. However, the Committee also noted the author’s submission that the only opportunity she had had to raise her claims before bringing them to the Court of Cassation had been to bring them before the community court. In that regard, the author pointed out that the proceedings before the community court had been extremely expedited, that the court had a single judge who was generally not a judge by profession, that the procedure was not subject to appeal and that she had not had the assistance of counsel. The author further contended that it was proper for her claims to be brought before the Court of Cassation, since, as in cases of a posteriori monitoring of constitutionality, they 13 See also the Committee’s Views in A.G.S. v. Spain (CCPR/C/115/D/2626/2015), para. 4.2. 7