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States Must Endeavour to Account for the Missing

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ICMP
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By Kathryne Bomberger

All over the world today, families of the missing will speak out about the agony of not knowing the fate of a loved one. The idea for the International Day of the Disappeared originated in Latin America nearly four decades ago among families of victims of enforced disappearance. The annual commemoration has shone a light on a phenomenon that is often misunderstood – and whose impact is equally often underestimated.

In post-conflict scenarios – from Bosnia to Iraq and from Nepal to Colombia – it has become increasingly clear that addressing the issue of large numbers of people who disappear in war is an indispensable element in consolidating peace. Since 2010, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance has helped to promote a clear set of measures and obligations through which this issue can be more effectively addressed.

But large-scale missing persons scenarios are not limited to conflict and political repression. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, for example, tens of thousands of unidentified victims were buried in mass graves, and this is a practice that is common in disaster scenarios across the developing world.

Migrants and refugees go missing as a result of exposure to the elements – in the Sahara, for example, or the deserts of the southern United States, or in the Mediterranean or the Bay of Bengal. And they also disappear as victims of people trafficking, exploited as undocumented workers or sold into outright slavery.

While there is no international convention dealing specifically with persons going missing other than enforced disappearance, governments have well recognized human rights obligations to investigate reports about missing persons and to establish the circumstances of their disappearance, and to do this without regard to nationality, ethnicity or other group characteristics. In particular, no lesser investigative standard is justified based on whether a person goes missing in armed conflict, a maritime disaster or as a migrant fleeing pervasive lawlessness and abuse.

Individuals may be traveling on forged documents, or with no documents at all; they may have paid a trafficker for passage in an unregistered vessel. These contraventions have no bearing on the obligations of states when people disappear. States must endeavor to account for the missing. They have legal obligations to do this. A just society depends on fundamental guarantees that apply equally to all.

The International Commission on Missing Persons, established 22 years ago at the G-7 Summit in Lyons, is the only international organization exclusively tasked to work on this issue. Its mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and others in locating and identifying missing persons from conflict, human rights abuses, disasters, organized crime, irregular migration and other causes and to assist them in doing so.

Two points should be highlighted. The first is that finding and identifying the missing, even when the numbers are huge and when considerable periods of time have elapsed, is technically and logistically possible. ICMP spearheaded an effort that has made it possible to account for more than 70 percent of the 40,000 who were missing at the end of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. As well as in the Balkans, ICMP has programs today in Iraq, Colombia, and Mexico, among the Syrian Diaspora, and with governments that are seeking to address the missing migrants issue in the Mediterranean – and in each case, it is helping authorities to establish viable long-term processes through which thousands of people can be accounted for.

The second point to emphasize is that, although they involve, among other things, the application of cutting-edge forensic science, these processes are not primarily technical – they are about upholding the rule of law. As long as large numbers of missing persons are unaccounted for, the credibility of the international legal system is placed in question, whether as a result of impunity on the part of criminals or the failure of authorities to meet their obligations. ICMP works with governments to develop legislative and institutional initiatives, and it works with families to assert their rights to truth, justice and reparations.

The close and necessary connection between upholding the rule of law and accounting for large numbers of missing persons should be communicated far and wide, particularly on this day.

Kathryne Bomberger is the Director-General of the International Commission on Missing Persons