## Facts

- Under the First Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), an individual may submit a communication to the U.N. Human Rights Committee alleging that a State party violated the ICCPR.
- Sandra Lovelace was a Canadian citizen of Maliseet Indian origin.
- Lovelace married a non-Indian man.
- Under Canada’s Indian Act at the time, an Indian woman who married a non-Indian man lost her status and related rights as an “Indian,” while an Indian man who married a non-Indian woman did not lose status.
- In December 1977, Lovelace submitted a communication against Canada alleging that this sex-based differential treatment violated the ICCPR.
- The Optional Protocol generally requires exhaustion of available domestic remedies before the Committee considers a communication.
- Lovelace asserted that domestic remedies were effectively exhausted because the Supreme Court of Canada had already upheld the Indian Act’s loss-of-status provision against a similar challenge under the Canadian Bill of Rights in *Attorney General of Canada v. Lavell; Isaac v. Bédard* (1974).
- The Committee’s 1979 decision addressed whether the communication should be accepted (admissibility), not the ultimate merits of the ICCPR claims.

## Issues

1. Whether Lovelace’s communication was inadmissible under Optional Protocol Article 5(2)(b) for failure to exhaust domestic remedies in Canada, given prior Supreme Court of Canada precedent on the same Indian Act provision.

## Decision

- The Human Rights Committee declared the communication admissible.
- The Committee treated the exhaustion requirement as satisfied where the State’s highest court had already substantially decided the question raised, making further court action unlikely to provide a real remedy on the same point.
- The Committee allowed the communication to proceed for consideration beyond admissibility (with the merits to be addressed in later stages).

## Legal Principles

- Under Optional Protocol Article 5(2)(b), an author is not required to pursue additional domestic proceedings when the highest court of the State party has already substantially resolved the same legal issue and further recourse would not provide a meaningful remedy.
- An admissibility decision determines whether the Committee will consider the communication; it does not decide whether the ICCPR was violated.
- Prior definitive domestic precedent on the same statutory provision can satisfy (or effectively satisfy) the exhaustion requirement when it shows that additional remedies are not realistically available.

## Conclusion

In *Lovelace v. Canada* (1979), the U.N. Human Rights Committee accepted Sandra Lovelace’s Optional Protocol communication as admissible, concluding that she did not need to pursue further Canadian remedies because the Supreme Court of Canada had already upheld the same Indian Act loss-of-status rule that she challenged as discriminatory under the ICCPR.


Lovelace v. Canada, U.N. Doc. CCPR/C/OP/1 at 10 (1979)