V. CONSIDERATION OF COMMUNICATIONS UNDER THE OPTIONAL PROTOCOL 606. Under the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, individuals who claim that any of their rights enumerated in the Covenant have been violated and who have exhausted all available domestic remedies may submit written communications to the Human Rights Committee for consideration. Of the 112 States that have ratified or acceded to the Covenant, 66 have accepted the Committee's competence to deal with individual complaints by becoming parties to the Optional Protocol (see annex I, sect* C ) . Since the CoTrmittee's last report to the General Assembly, 11 States have ratified or acceded to the Optional Protocol: Angola, Australia, Benin, Bulgaria, Chile, Cyprus, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, the Russian Federation and Seychelles, Ho communication can be examined by the Committee if it concerns a State party to the Covenant that is not also a party to the Optional Protocol. 607. Consideration of communications under the Optional Protocol is confidential and takes place in closed meetings (art. 5 (3) of the Optional Protocol). All documents pertaining to the work of the Committee under the Optional Protocol (submissions from the parties and other working documents of the Committee) are confidential. The texts of final decisions of the Committee, consisting of views adopted under article 5 (4) of the Optional Protocol, are however made public. As regards decisions declaring a communication inadmissible, which are also final, the Committee has decided that it will normally make these decisions public, substituting initials for the names of the alleged victim(s) and the author(s). A. Progress of work 608. The Committee started its work under the Optional Protocol at its second session in 1977. Since then, 514 communications concerning 42 States parties have been registered for consideration by the Committee, including 46 placed before it at its forty-third to forty-fifth sessions, covered by the present report. 609. The status of the 514 communications registered for consideration by the Human Rights Committee so far is as follows; (a) Concluded by views under article 5, paragraph 4, of the Optional Protocol: 138; (b) Declared inadmissible: 155; <c) Discontinued or withdrawn: 80; (d) Declared admissible, but not yet concluded: (e) Pending at the pre-admissibility stage: 92. 49; 610. In addition, the secretariat of the Committee has several hundred communications on file, in respect of which the authors have been advised that further information would be needed before their communications could be -145-