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agreement of the members of the Commission, any member may attach to it a
separate opinion. The written and oral statements made by the parties in accordance
with paragraph 1.e of Article 48 shall also be attached to the report.
2.
The report shall be transmitted to the states concerned, which shall not be at
liberty to publish it.
3.
In transmitting the report, the Commission may make such proposals and
recommendations as it sees fit.
The above provision describes the last step of the Commission's proceedings before the case
under consideration is ready for submission to the Court. The application of this article presumes
that no solution has been reached in the previous stages of the proceedings.
62.
Article 51 of the Convention, in turn, reads:
1.
If, within a period of three months from the date of the transmittal of the
report of the Commission to the states concerned, the matter has not either been
settled or submitted by the Commission or by the state concerned to the Court and
its jurisdiction accepted, the Commission may, by the vote of an absolute majority of
its members, set forth its opinion and conclusions concerning the question submitted
for its consideration.
2.
Where appropriate, the Commission shall make pertinent recommendations
and shall prescribe a period within which the state is to take the measures that are
incumbent upon it to remedy the situation examined.
3.
When the prescribed period has expired, the Commission shall decide by the
vote of an absolute majority of its members whether the state has taken adequate
measures and whether to publish its report.
The Court need not analyze here the nature of the time limit set by Article 51 (1), nor the
consequences that would result under different assumptions were such a period to expire without
the case being brought before the Court. The Court will simply emphasize that because this
period starts to run on the date of the transmittal to the parties of the report referred to in Article
50, this offers the Government one last opportunity to resolve the case before the Commission
and before the matter can be submitted to a judicial decision.
63.
Article 51 (1) also considers the possibility of the Commission preparing a new report
containing its opinion, conclusions and recommendations, which may be published as stipulated in
Article 51 (3). This provision poses many problems of interpretation, such as, for example,
defining the significance of this report and how it resembles or differs from the Article 50 report.
Nevertheless, these matters are not crucial to the resolution of the procedural issues now before
the Court. In this case, however, it should be borne in mind that the preparation of the Article 51
report is conditional upon the matter not having been submitted to the Court within the threemonth period set by Article 51 (1). Thus, if the application has been filed with the Court, the
Commission has no authority to draw up the report referred to in Article 51.
64.
The Government maintains that the above procedures were not fully complied with. The
Court will now examine this objection, keeping in mind the special features of the procedure
followed before the Commission, which gave rise to some unique problems due largely to
initiatives taken both by the Commission and the Government.