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reporting procedure set forth in Article 9 of the International Convention on the Elimination
of Racial Discrimination (hereinafter “ICERD”), whereby the State parties undertake to
periodically submit “a report on the legislative, judicial, administrative or other measures
which they have adopted and which give effect to the provisions of this Convention”. Said
procedure is similar to the one described above for the HR Committee. Moreover, the followup procedure decision issued by the CERD involved a review of the measures adopted by
the State in order to comply with the concluding observations and recommendations
previously adopted, as well as a request for further information pursuant to Article 9,
paragraph 1, of ICERD, and Article 65 of the Committee’s Rules of Procedure.
53.
Second, the CERD issued three decisions regarding its early warning measures and
urgent action procedure, a preventive mechanism adopted in 1993 to seek the prevention of
“existing problems from escalating into conflicts” and “to respond to problems requiring
immediate attention to prevent or limit the scale or number of serious violations of the
Convention”. This mechanism differs as well from the procedure of individual complaints,
under which the CERD may consider individual communications relating to States parties,
only if the States made the necessary declaration under Article 14 of ICERD, which
Suriname has not done yet. The CERD acknowledged such differentiation by stating that the
early warning and urgent action procedure “is clearly distinct from the communication
procedure under Article 14 of the Convention. Furthermore, the nature and urgency of the
issue examined in this decision go well beyond the limits of the communication
procedure”.48
54.
From the above considerations, this Tribunal concludes that the reporting procedures
of the universal treaty-based bodies as well as that of the early warning and urgent
procedure of the CERD cannot be considered to be of the same object, purpose, and nature
as the adjudicatory jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court. The former do not involve a
petitioning party requesting redress for the violation of the rights of the Saramaka people.
Rather than adjudicating controversies and ordering appropriate reparations, such
procedures consist of reviews of the general situation pertaining to human rights or to racial
discrimination in a certain country, in this case Suriname, or concern a special situation
involving racial discrimination in need of urgent attention. Furthermore, the nature of the
concluding observations and recommendations issued by said Committees is different from
the judgments delivered by the Inter-American Court.
55.
In light of these considerations, it is unnecessary for the Court to address whether
the parties involved in such international proceedings are identical to those in the present
case, or whether the legal grounds are identical.
Suffice it for the Court that the
proceedings before the HR Committee and the CERD are intrinsically of a diverse object,
purpose, and nature than those of the present case. Thus, the Court hereby dismisses the
State’s sixth preliminary objection regarding the alleged duplicity of international
proceedings in relation to the aforementioned decisions of the HR Committee and the CERD.
56.
With respect to the allegations that this Court has already decided on the right to
property of “maroon and/or indigenous people” in the Case of the Moiwana Community v.
Suriname (hereinafter “Moiwana case”), this Court recalls that in order to find res judicata
there should be identity between the cases, that is to say, the parties must be the same and
legal grounds of the object of the action must be identical (supra para. 48).
48
UNCERD, Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedure, Decision 1 (68) on United States of America (Sixtyeighth session, 2006), U.N. Doc. CERD/C/USA/DEC/1, April 11, 2006, para. 4.
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