4 effect on the protection of human rights. Rules which are procedural in nature, such as the local remedies rule in the particular context of human rights protection, enshrined in the human rights treaty at issue for the purpose of sifting complaints, could hardly be placed on the same footing as the norms on the very rights guaranteed, the ensurance of the observance of which is properly to attract the attention of the Court. If the Court was taken to be empowered to review the Commission’s decisions on admissibility, if both organs were to pronounce on the objection of non-exhaustion, this might regrettably pave the way for possibly diverging or conflicting decisions by the two organs on the point at issue;(3) such an outcome would seem hardly conducive to strengthening the international mechanism of human rights protection concerned. 10. In the present case, the Court rightly holds that the respondent Government is clearly estopped from relying at this stage upon the objection of non-exhaustion in view of its tacit waiver of that objection, as it failed to raise it in the proceedings on the admissibility of the application before the Commission. Taking the point further, it may be argued that even if a respondent Government had raised that objection at the preliminary stage of admissibility and the Commission had rejected it, the objection could no longer be pursued or relied upon by the Government before the Court; that decision by the Commission is to be regarded as final, insofar as the local remedies rule is concerned. This would prevent the Court from even hearing that objection, once it had not been raised before the Commission, as in the present case, or, having been raised, had been rejected by the Commission: the plea simply could not be relied upon before the Court. Such ground alone would suffice therefore to reject that objection, in the two circumstances contemplated herein. This approach, properly applied, would furthermore strongly discourage the Court to consider joining to the merits the issue of exhaustion, which would invariably prejudice the alleged victims, or have no concrete effect on the protection of their rights, for the reasons above referred to. The dismissal by the Commission of a preliminary objection of non-exhaustion is as such an indivisible one, covering the conditions of application of the local remedies rule under the Convention, that is, the incidence of the rule as well as the exceptions to it. This seems in keeping with the rationale of the rule in the context of the international protection of human rights. 11. The specificity or special character of human rights treaties and instruments, the nature and gravity of certain human rights violations and the imperatives of protection of the human person stress the need to avoid unfair consequences and to secure to this end a necessarily distinct (more flexible and equitable) application of the local remedies rule in the particular context of the international protection of human rights. This has accounted for, in the present domain of protection, the application of the principles of good faith and estoppel in the safeguard of due process and of the rights of the alleged victims, the distribution of the burden of proof as to exhaustion of local remedies between the alleged victim and the respondent Government with a heavier burden upon the latter,(4) the clarifications This is more than a theoretical possibility, it has already happened: in a recent case (Cardot, 1991) under the European Convention on Human Rights, the respondent Government’s objection of nonexhaustion had earlier been rejected by the Commission, but was later retaken by the Court, which retained and upheld it and found itself unable to take cognizance of the merits of the case due to the applicant’s alleged failure to exhaust local remedies. (3) (4) Three Honduran Cases, IACHR: Preliminary Objections, 1987 (“Velásquez Rodríguez”, § 88; “Godínez Cruz”, § 90; “Fairén Garbi and Solís Corrales”, § 87); and merits (“Velásquez Rodríguez”, 1988, §§ 56-60 and 73; “Godínez Cruz”, 1989, §§ 62-63 and 76; “Fairén Garbi and