B. Requirements for Admissibility 1. Exhaustion of domestic remedies and deadline for presentation of the petition 58. The State alleges that the petitioner in question does not meet the requirement of prior exhaustion of domestic remedies set out in Article 46(1)(a) of the American Convention. This claim is made in its communication of October 8, 2003, approximately one year after the original petition was filed on September 26, 2002. In keeping with its Rules of Procedure, the Commission requested a response from the State within two months. The delay of more than one year in submitting the response allows the Commission to consider the exception of failure to exhaust as untimely, following the numerous examples in the jurisprudence of the interAmerican system, which has established that an exception must be protested in a timely manner in order to be valid and, for that purpose, must be proposed in the first stages of the procedure before the Commission, otherwise the State concerned is presumed to have tacitly forfeited any such protest.5 However, in light of the State’s subsequent response and for the sake of legal security and to preserve the State’s right to a defense, the Commission in this case shall not apply the said presumption and shall expressly issue an opinion on the question of the requirement of prior exhaustion of domestic remedies. 59. In its communication of October 8, 2003, the State reported that on the Venezuelan law books there is “a wide range of legal and constitutional actions to punish, redress, and prevent the acts that allegedly occurred.” The State reported that the Attorney General’s Office was actively working on the 22 criminal cases filed by the petitioners with various public prosecutors’ offices. The State also alleged that the petitioners have special legal action at their disposal, such as constitutional amparo. 60. The State alleges that the time spent on elucidating the violations reported is reasonable given the complexity of the cases and the probative process. To illustrate this claim, the State cites the complexity of the cases of reports of threatening phone calls, insults hurled from passing cars, and the two cases of projectiles launched from an unknown location, as well as the complexity of the investigation into the reported facts, ”which occurred during a public disturbance involving many witnesses in the country’s capital city, who must be located for questioning.” 61. The petitioners also allege the applicability of the exception of prior exhaustion of domestic remedies provided in Article 46(2)(c), owing to the unwarranted delay on the part of the Attorney General’s Office in conducting investigations into the reported facts expeditiously and within the deadlines established by law. They also allege the existence of indices of impunity and lack of independence surrounding the investigation into this matter. The petitioners argue that the Attorney General’s Office should review the evidence they have submitted identifying those responsible. They claim that, instead of performing its responsibilities, the Attorney General’s Office limited itself to taking depositions only. The petitioners declare that in view of the lack of initiative on the part of the Attorney General’s Office, they actively helped carry out the investigation by taking “statements from the victims, submitting video tapes, audio tapes, documentary evidence, digital photos identifying those responsible for the acts of violence, helping the experts trace the trajectory of bullets.” The alleged victims also resorted to forensic agencies for expert diagnosis of the cause of their bodily injuries. 62. In light of the petitioners’ claims of inactivity on the part of the Attorney General’s Office, the State argues that the petitioners did not use the domestic remedies available to them in Venezuela’s Organic Code of Criminal Procedure. 6 The State notes that, if the delay were 5 See, inter alia, IACHR Report Nº 31/031, Petition 12.195, Admissibility, Mario Alberto Jara Oñate et al., Chile, March 7, 2003, para. 35 and Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni Community Case, Preliminary Exceptions, Judgment of February 1, 2000, paras. 53 and 54. 6 The State’s response points out that the Organic Code of Criminal Procedure provides for a legal mechanism whereby the victim has recourse to a Criminal Oversight Judge of First Instance, who will set a deadline for the Attorney General’s Office to complete an investigation, with a penalty for noncompliance. 11