98 The respondent claimed that the petitioners had not exhausted the avenues for redress in Kenya’s court system. They asked the court to put the matter aside until such a time that the avenues for redress had been exhausted. Summary of judgment • On the issue of admissibility, the African Committee had to decide on whether local remedies had been exhausted and whether the complaint had been filed within a reasonable period of time. The established rule in international human rights law was that only available, effective and adequate remedies needed exhaustion. A remedy was effective if the complainant could pursue it without an obstacle, it was effective if it showed a hint of success and it was sufficient if it was capable of redressing the complaint. Remedies that were extra-judicial such as administrative procedures with the local Government were not in the category of local remedies that had to be exhausted for purposes of admissibility. • The complainants had indicated that they had engaged the judicial system in Kenya without success. Procedural technicalities meant that a High Court case was still pending. The complainants could be exempted from exhausting local remedies if their attempt was unreasonably prolonged. An unreasonably prolonged domestic remedy could not be said to be available, effective or sufficient. The African Committee held that the six years that had lapsed without the High Court case being determined on its merits meant that the local remedy was unduly prolonged and the complainants qualified for an exception to the requirement that they should exhaust local remedies. It also held that the communication was brought within a reasonable time, after waiting for a sufficient period to see if local remedies would be forthcoming. • The practice of making children wait until they were 18 years of age to apply to acquire nationality could not be seen as an effort on the part of the State Party to comply with its children’s rights obligations. It added that the fact that the Kenyan State left children of Nubian descent without a nationality for a very long period of 18 years was not in line with the spirit and purpose of article 6 and it did not promote the children’s best interests. • A stateless child was a child who was not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its laws. A stateless child faced an uncertain future and could find difficulty in benefiting from protection and constitutional guarantees offered by the State. Under Kenyan domestic law, citizenship could be acquired in four ways; birth, descent, registration and naturalisation. Nubians in Kenyan had acquired citizenship through those four ways. The African Committee therefore made the finding that children of Nubian descent had not been left stateless. • The African Committee did not suggest that the State Parties to the African Children’s Charter should introduce citizenship by birth approach but it explained that the intent of that Charter in article 6(4) was that if a child was born on the territory of a State Party and was not granted nationality by another State, the State in whose territory CITIZENSHIP AND NATIONALITY RIGHTS CASE DIGEST