44. These provisions establish that, once the petition or communication has been “lodged” before the Commission, the admissibility procedure begins during which it is necessary to decide whether or not, when it was “lodged,” it complied with the requirements stipulated in the said Article 46. If the decision is affirmative, the said petition should be declared “admissible,” and if the decision is negative, it should be declared “inadmissible.” It should be underscored that the said article of the Convention does not establish that it is sufficient that, when the Commission rules on its admissibility, the petition has met those requirements. It merely indicates that, for the “petition lodged” to be admitted, the remedies of the domestic jurisdiction should have been pursued and exhausted. Consequently, it is with regard to the petition or communication “lodged” that the Commission should rule on whether, at that instant and not later, it met the requirement of the prior exhaustion of the domestic remedies or that it has been argued that this was not possible. H. Supplementary means of interpretation 45. Regarding the supplementary means of interpretation, it should be indicated that, based on the background material for the Convention, there is no record of the legal doctrine that inspired the provisions of its Article 46(1)(a), in particular the phrase “that the remedies under domestic law have been pursued and exhausted in accordance with generally recognized principles of international law.” 46. Therefore, it can be presumed that this was done – that is, this phrase was included without the need to justify the reference to the said principles – because it was already solidly incorporated in or recognized by public international law when the International Court of Justice decided the third preliminary objection filed by the United States of America in the Case of Interhandel, 1959. Thus, that Court indicated that: “ The rule that local remedies must be exhausted before international proceedings may be instituted is a well-established rule of customary international law.”50 47. Hence, since it was a principle of international law, founded on extremely wellestablished customary public international law, it was probably not found necessary to justify its incorporation into the Convention. In this way, the Convention not only consolidated it even more by establishing it in its text, but also did not limit it to the “national” of the respondent State. Indeed, it made it applicable “to all persons subject to [the] jurisdiction” 51 of its States Parties, whether or not they were nationals of any of them. 48. That said, owing to the position taken in this opinion, the interesting point is that, according to the said decision of the International Court of Justice, which should be understood as the precedent for Article 46(1)(c) of the Convention, the exhaustion of 2. However, in serious and urgent cases, only the presentation of a petition or communication that fulfills all the formal requirements of admissibility shall be necessary in order for the Commission to conduct an investigation with the prior consent of the state in whose territory a violation has allegedly been committed. 50 Interhandel Case (Switzerland v. United States of America), Judgment of March 21, 1959 : “The rule that local remedies must be exhausted before international proceedings may be instituted is a well-established rule of customary international law; the rule has been generally observed in cases in which a State has adopted the cause of its national whose rights are claimed to have been disregarded in another State in violation of international law. Before resort may be had to an international court in such a situation, it has been considered necessary that the State where the violation occurred should have an opportunity to redress it by its own means, within the framework of its own domestic legal system. A fortiori the rule must be observed when domestic proceedings are pending, as in the case of Interhandel, and when the two actions, that of the Swiss Company in the United States courts and that of the Swiss Government in this Court, in its principal Submission, are designed to obtain the same result: the restitution of the assets of Interhandel vested in the United States.” 51 Supra, footnote 23. 12