Enforced Disappearance

An enforced disappearance (or forced disappearance) is the secret abduction or imprisonment of a person by a state or political organization, or by a third party with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of a state or political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person's fate and whereabouts, with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which came into force on 1 July 2002, when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed at any civilian population, a "forced disappearance" qualifies as a crime against humanity, not subject to a statute of limitations, in international criminal law. On 20 December 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

Often, forced disappearance implies murder: a victim is abducted, may be illegally detained and often tortured during interrogation, ultimately killed, and their body disposed of secretly. The party committing the murder has plausible deniability, as there is no evidence of the victim's death. In enforced disappearance cases states are obliged under international human rights law to return the remains of the forcibly disappeared persons to their families.

"Disappearing" political rivals is also a way for regimes to enforce complicity in populations. The difficulty of publicly fighting a government that murders in secret can result in the widespread pretense that everything is normal, as it did in the Dirty War in Argentina.

Human rights law

In international human rights law, disappearances at the hands of the state have been labeled as "enforced" or "forced disappearances" since the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action. For example, the practice is specifically addressed by the OAS's Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons. There is also some authority indicating that enforced disappearances occurring during armed conflict, such as Nazi Germany's Night and Fog program, may constitute war crimes.

In February 1980 the United Nations established the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, "the first United Nations human rights thematic mechanism to be established with a universal mandate." Its main task "is to assist families in determining the fate or whereabouts of their family members who have reportedly disappeared." In August 2014, the working group reported 43,250 unresolved cases of disappearances in 88 different states.

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, adopted by the UN General Assembly on 20 December 2006, also states that the widespread or systematic practice of enforced disappearances constitutes a crime against humanity. It gives victims' families the right to seek reparations and to demand the truth about the disappearance of their loved ones. The convention provides for the right not to be subjected to enforced disappearance, as well as the right for the relatives of the disappeared person to know the truth. The convention contains several provisions concerning the prevention, investigation, and sanctioning of this crime. It also contains provisions about the rights of victims and their relatives, and the wrongful removal of children born during their captivity. The convention further sets forth the obligation of international cooperation, both in the suppression of the practice and in dealing with humanitarian aspects related to the crime. The convention establishes a Committee on Enforced Disappearances, which will be charged with important and innovative functions of monitoring and protection at an international level. Currently, an international campaign of the International Coalition against Enforced Disappearances is working towards universal ratification of the convention.

Disappearances work on two levels: not only do they silence opponents and critics who have disappeared, but they also create uncertainty and fear in the wider community, silencing others who are thought would oppose and criticize. Disappearances entail the violation of many fundamental human rights declared in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). For the disappeared person, these include the right to liberty, the right to personal security and humane treatment (including freedom from torture), the right to a fair trial, to legal counsel and to equal protection under the law, and the right of presumption of innocence. Their families, who often spend the rest of their lives searching for information on the disappeared, are also victims.

International criminal law

According to the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, enforced disappearances constitute a crime against humanity when committed as a part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population with the knowledge of the attack. The Rome Statute defines enforced disappearances differently than international human rights law, namely as "the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, to remove them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time" (Article 7.2(i))

History of the legal development and international jurisprudence

General background

The evocation of the crime of forced disappearance begins with the history of the rights stated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, formulated on 26 August 1789 in France by the authorities that emerged from the French Revolution, where it was already stated in Articles 7 and 12:

Art. 7. No person may be charged, detained or imprisoned except in cases determined by the law and in the manner prescribed therein. Those requesting, facilitating, executing or executing arbitrary orders must be punished ...
Art. 12. The guarantee of the rights of man and of the citizen needs a public force. This force is therefore instituted for the benefit of all, and not for the particular utility of those who are in charge of it.

Throughout the nineteenth century, along with the technological advancements applied to wars that led to increased mortality among combatants and damage to civilian populations during conflicts, movements for humanitarian awareness in Western societies resulted in the founding of the first humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross in 1859, and the first international typification of abuses and crimes in the form of the 1864 Geneva Conventions. After the Second World War, in 1946, the Nuremberg trials brought to public attention the breadth of the ''Nacht und Nebel'' decree, one of the most prominent antecedents of the crime of enforced disappearance. The trials included the testimony of 20 of those persons considered a threat to the security of Nazi Germany and whom the regime detained and condemned to death in the occupied territories of Europe. However, the executions were not carried out immediately; at one time, the people were deported to Germany and imprisoned at locations such as the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, where they ended up disappearing, and no information about their whereabouts and fate was given as per point III of the decree:

III. ... In case German or foreign authorities inquire about such prisoners, they are to be told that they were arrested, but that the proceedings do not allow any further information.

German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was condemned in connection with his role in the application of the "NN decree" by Adolf Hitler, although, as it had not been accepted at the time that enforced disappearances were crimes against humanity, the International Criminal Tribunal in Nuremberg found him guilty of war crimes.

Since 1974, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights have been the first international human rights bodies to react to the phenomenon of disappearances, following complaints made in connection with the Chilean military coup of 11 September 1973. The report of the Working Group to Investigate the Situation of Human Rights in that country, which was submitted to the United Nations Commission on 4 February 1976, illustrated such a case for the first time, that of Alphonse-René Chanfreau, of French origin, arrested in July 1974 at his home in Santiago de Chile.

Earlier, in February 1975, the UN Commission on Human Rights had used the terms "persons unaccounted for" or "persons whose disappearance was not justified," in a resolution that dealt with the disappearances in Cyprus as a result of the armed conflict that resulted in the division of the island, as part of the two General Assembly resolutions adopted in December 1975 with respect to Cyprus and Chile.

1977 and 1979 resolutions

In 1977, the General Assembly of the United Nations again discussed disappearances in its resolution 32/118. By then, the Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel had made an international appeal that, with the support of the French government, obtained the response of the General Assembly in the form of resolution 33/173 of 20 December 1978, which specifically referred to "missing persons" and requested the Commission on Human Rights to make appropriate recommendations.

On 6 March 1979, the Commission authorized the appointment as experts of Dr. Felix Ermacora and Waleed M. Sadi, who later resigned due to political pressure, to study the question of the fate of disappearances in Chile, issuing a report to the General Assembly on 21 November 1979. Felix Ermacora's report became a reference point on the legal issue of crime by including a series of conclusions and recommendations which were later collected by international organizations and bodies.

Meanwhile, during the same year, the General Assembly of the Organization of American States adopted a resolution on Chile on 31 October, in which it declared that the practice of disappearances was "an affront to the conscience of the hemisphere", after having sent in September a mission of the Inter-American Commission to Argentina, which confirmed the systematic practice of enforced disappearances by successive military juntas. Despite the exhortations of non-governmental organizations and family organizations of the victims, in the same resolution of 31 October 1979, the General Assembly of the OAS issued a statement, after receiving pressure from the Argentine government, in which only the states in which persons had disappeared were urged to refrain from enacting or enforcing laws that might hinder the investigation of such disappearances.

Shortly after the report by Félix Ermacora, the UN Commission on Human Rights considered one of the proposals made and decided on 29 February 1980 to set up the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, the first of the so-called thematic mechanisms of the commission and the most important body of the United Nations that has since been dealing with the problem of disappearances in cases that can be attributed to governments, as well as issuing recommendations to the commission and governments on the improvement of the protection afforded to miss persons and their families and to prevent cases of enforced disappearance. Since then, different causes began to be developed in various international legal bodies, whose sentences served to establish a specific jurisprudence on enforced disappearance.

1983 OAS resolution and first convictions

The United Nations Human Rights Committee, established in 1977 in accordance with article 28 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to monitor compliance by states parties with their obligations, issued in March 1982 and July 1983, two sentences condemning the State of Uruguay for the cases of Eduardo Bleier, a former member of the Communist Party of Uruguay, residing in Hungary and Israel, disappeared after his arrest in 1975 in Montevideo, and Elena Quinteros Almeida, missing since her arrest at the Venezuelan Embassy in Montevideo in June 1976, in an incident that led to the suspension of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In its judgments, the Committee relied on a number of articles of the International Covenant, in particular, those relating to "the right to liberty and personal security", "the right of detainees to be treated humanely and with respect to the inherent dignity of the human being" and "the right of every human being to the recognition of his juridical personality", while in the case of Quinteros, it was solved for the first time in favor of the relatives considered equally victims.

In 1983, the Organization of American States (OAS) declared by its resolution 666 XIII-0/83 that any enforced disappearance should be described as a crime against humanity. A few years later, in 1988 and 1989, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights promulgated the first convictions declaring the State of Honduras guilty for violating its duty to respect and guarantee the rights to life, liberty and personal integrity of the disappeared Angel Manfredo Velásquez Rodríguez. Rodríguez was a Honduran student kidnapped in September 1981 in Tegucigalpa by heavily armed civilians connected with the Honduran Armed Forces and Saúl Godínez Cruz. Since the express definition of the crime of enforced disappearance had not yet been defined, the Court had to rely on different articles of the American Convention on Human Rights of 1969. Other rulings issued by the Inter-American Court condemned Colombia, Guatemala (for several cases including the call of the "street children"), Peru, and Bolivia.

Situation in Europe and resolutions of 1993 and 1995

In Europe, the European Court of Human Rights, established in 1959, in accordance with article 38 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950, became a single permanent and binding court for all the Member States of the Council of Europe. Although the European Convention does not contain any express prohibition of the practice of enforced disappearance, the Court dealt with several cases of disappearance in 1993 in the context of the conflict between the Turkish security forces and members or supporters of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) from the Kurdish region to the southeast of Turkey.

Another body providing the basis for the legal definition of the crime of enforced disappearance was the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina, a human rights tribunal established under Annex 6 of the Dayton Peace Agreement of 14 December 1995 which, although it was declared incompetent by ratione temporis to deal with the majority of the 20,000 cases reported, it issued a number of sentences against the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which compensated several families of disappeared persons.

Towards the 1992 International Convention

In parallel with the resolutions of the international organizations, several non-governmental organizations drafted projects for an international convention. In 1981, the ''Institut des droits de l'homme du Barreau de Paris'' (Institute of Human Rights of the Paris Law School) organized a high-level symposium to promote an international convention on disappearances, followed by several draft declarations and conventions proposed by the Argentine League for Human Rights, FEDEFAM at the annual congress of Peru in 1982 or the ''Colectivo de Abogados José Alvear Restrepo'' from Bogotá in 1988.

In that same year, the French expert in the then Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, Louis Joinet, prepared the draft text to be adopted in 1992 by the General Assembly with the title Declaration on the Protection of All Persons Against enforced disappearances. The definition presented was based on the one traditionally used by the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Although the Declaration included as the primary obligation of States to enact specific criminal legislation, unlike the Convention against Torture, the principle of universal jurisdiction was not established nor was it agreed that the provisions of the Declaration and the recommendations of the Working Group were legally binding so that only a few states took concrete steps to comply with them.

The United Nations Declaration, despite its shortcomings, served to awaken the regional project for the American continent commissioned by the OAS General Assembly in 1987, which, although drafted by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 1988, was subjected to lengthy discussions and modifications that resulted in their stagnation. In June 1994, the OAS General Assembly finally approved the Inter-American Convention on the Forced Disappearance of Persons, which would be the first legally binding instrument on the subject, and entered into force on 28 March 1996, after its ratification by eight countries: Argentina, Panama, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Guatemala.

In view of the meager success of the United Nations Declaration, a non-binding instrument that could only marginally influence the practice of enforced disappearances, a number of non-governmental organizations and several experts proposed strengthening protection against disappearances, adopting a convention within the framework of the United Nations. This was followed by the deliberations of the 1981 Paris Colloquium submitted by Louis Joinet in the form of a draft subcommittee in August 1988. Several governments, international organizations and non-governmental organizations responded to the invitation of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to provide comments and observations to the project.

The 2006 International Convention

On 20 December 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the text of the International Convention on the Forced Disappearance of Persons after more than 25 years of development and was signed in Paris on 6 February 2007 at a ceremony to which representatives of the 53 first signatory countries attended and in which 20 of them immediately ratified it. On 19 April 2007, the Commission on Human Rights updated the list of countries that ratified the convention, which included 59 nations.

Report of the UN (1980–2009)

Since the establishment of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (CHR) in 1980, the crime of enforced disappearance has proved to be a global problem, affecting many countries on five continents. It is the subject of a special follow-up by the HRC which regularly publishes reports on its complaint and situation, as well as the response and action of the governments concerned.

The report of the 2009 Working Group recorded a total of 53,232 cases transmitted by the Working Group to Governments since their inception in 1980 and affecting 82 states. The number of cases that are still under study due to lack of clarification, closed or discontinuous cases amounts to 42,600. Since 2004 the Working Group had clarified 1,776 cases. In the previous report of 2007, the number of cases had been 51,531 and affected 79 countries. Many of the countries in the cases are affected internally by violent conflicts, while in other countries the practice of repressive policies towards political opponents is denounced. In other countries, generally in the western and European hemispheres, there are still historical cases that remain unresolved and constitute permanent crimes.

In the official UN report of 2009, of the 82 countries where the cases of missing persons were identified, the largest number (more than 1000) transmitted were: Iraq (16,544), Sri Lanka (12,226), Argentina (3,449), Guatemala (3,155), Peru (3,009), Algeria (2,939), El Salvador (2,661) and Colombia (1,235). Other countries with numerous cases under denunciation (between 1000 and 100) are: Chile (907), China (116), Congo (114), Ethiopia (119), Philippines (780), Honduras (207), India (430), Indonesia (165), Iran (532), Lebanon (320), Morocco (268), Mexico (392), Nepal (672), Nicaragua (234), Russian Federation (478), Sudan, Yemen (155) and East Timor (504).

Examples

NGOs such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch record in their annual report the number of known cases of forced disappearance.

Algeria

During the Algerian Civil War, which began in 1992 as Islamist guerrillas attacked the military government which had annulled an Islamist electoral victory, thousands of people were forcibly disappeared. Disappearances continued up to the late 1990s but thereafter dropped off sharply with the decline in violence in 1997. Some of the disappeared were kidnapped or killed by the guerrillas, but others are presumed to have been taken by state security services. This latter group has become the most controversial. Their exact numbers remain disputed, but the government has acknowledged a figure of just over 6,000 disappeared, now presumed dead. Opposition sources claim the real number is closer to 17,000. (The war claimed a total toll of 150,000–200,000 deaths).

In 2005 a controversial amnesty law was approved in a referendum. It granted financial compensation to families of the "disappeared", but also effectively ended the police investigations into the crimes.

Argentina

During Argentina's Dirty War and Operation Condor, many alleged political dissidents were abducted or illegally detained and kept in clandestine detention centers such as ESMA, where they were questioned, tortured, and almost always killed. There were about 500 clandestine detention camps, including those of Garaje Azopardo and Orletti. These places of torture, located mostly in Buenos Aires, Argentina, contributed up to 30,000 desaparecidos, or disappeared persons, to the overall count in the Dirty War. The victims would be shipped to places like a garage or basement and tortured day after day. The disappeared ones were people who were considered to be a political or ideological threat to the military junta. The Argentine military justified torture to obtain intelligence and saw the disappearances as a way to curb political dissidence. Abducted pregnant women were kept captive until they gave birth, then often killed. It is estimated that 500 babies born in this way were given for informal adoption to families with close ties to the military.

Eventually, many of the captives were heavily drugged and loaded onto aircraft, from which they were thrown alive while in flight over the Atlantic Ocean in "death flights" (''vuelos de la muerte''), so as to leave no trace of their death. Without any dead bodies, the government could deny any knowledge of their whereabouts and accusations that they had been killed. The forced disappearances were the military junta's attempt to silence the opposition and break the determination of the guerrillas. Missing people who are presumed to have been murdered in this and other ways are today referred to as "the disappeared" (''los desaparecidos'').

Activist groups Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo were formed in 1977 by mothers and grandmothers of the "disappeared" victims of the dictatorship, with the goal of finding the children born in captivity during the Dirty War, and later to determine the culprits of crimes against humanity and promote their trial and sentencing. Some 500 children are estimated to have been illegally given for adoption; 120 cases had been confirmed by DNA tests .

The term ''desaparecidos'' was used by ''de facto'' President General Jorge Rafael Videla, who said in a press conference "They are just that… ''desaparecidos''. They are not alive, neither are they dead. They are just missing". It is thought that between 1976 and 1983 in Argentina, up to 30,000 people (8,960 named cases, according to the official report by the CONADEP) were killed and in many cases disappeared. In an originally classified cable first published by John Dinges in 2004, the Argentine 601st Intelligence Battalion, which started counting victims in 1975, in mid-1978 estimated that 22,000 persons had been killed or "disappeared".

Bangladesh

Since 2010, under the Awami League regime, at least 500 people – most of whom are opposition leaders and activists – have been declared disappeared in Bangladesh by the state security forces. According to the report of a domestic human rights organization, 82 people have disappeared from January to September 2014. After the disappearances, at least 39 of the victims were found dead while others remained missing. On 25 June 2010, an opposition leader Chowdhury Alam was arrested by the state police and remained missing since then. His abduction was later denied by the law enforcing agencies. On 17 April 2012, another prominent leader, Ilyas Ali, of the main opposition parties Bangladesh Nationalist Party disappeared by the unknown armed personnel. The incident got much media coverage. Before the controversial national election of 2014, at least 19 opposition men were picked up by security forces. The incidents of enforced disappearances were condemned by both domestic and international human rights organizations. Despite the demands for the government initiatives to probe such disappearances, investigations into such cases were absent.

Belarus

In 1999 opposition leaders Yury Zacharanka and Viktar Hanchar together with his business associate Anatol Krasouski disappeared. Hanchar and Krasouski disappeared the same day of a broadcast on state television in which President Alexander Lukashenko ordered the chiefs of his security services to crack down on "opposition scum". Although the State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus (KGB) had had them under constant surveillance, the official investigation announced that the case could not be solved. The investigation of the disappearance of journalist Dzmitry Zavadski in 2000 has also yielded no results. Copies of a report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which linked senior Belarusian officials to the cases of disappearances, were confiscated.

In December 2019, Deutsche Welle published a documentary film in which Yury Garavski, a former member of a special unit of the Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs, confirmed that it was his unit which had arrested, taken away, and murdered Zecharanka and that they later did the same with Viktar Hanchar and Anatol Krassouski.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

The President of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 8 April 1994, Alija Izetbegović, signed an act that allowed the army and the intelligence services to carry out forced disappearances to spread terror and demoralize Serb fighters in the War of Bosnia. In response to this act, the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina created the 125th Battalion that, along with the ICSR (Informativni Centar za Spas Republike, the former intelligence service of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina), was responsible for the kidnap, torture and disappearance through death flights of captured Serb fighters in the war. Mostar Airport was used, during the war, to detain disappeared people. In 2015, Amnesty International asked "authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina to truly commit to resolving the over 8,000 outstanding cases of enforced disappearances from the war".

Chile

Almost immediately after the military's seizure of power on 11 September 1973, the Chilean military junta led by the then commander-in-chief Augusto Pinochet banned all the leftist parties that had constituted the democratically elected president Salvador Allende's UP coalition., Retrieved 24 October 2006 through Google Books. All other parties were placed in "indefinite recess", and were later banned outright. The regime's violence was directed not only against dissidents, but also against their families and other civilians.

The Rettig Report concluded 2,279 persons who disappeared during the military dictatorship were killed for political reasons or as a result of political violence, and approximately 31,947 were tortured according to the later Valech Report, while 1,312 were exiled. The latter were chased all over the world by the intelligence agencies. In Latin America, this was made under the auspices of Operation Condor, a combined operation between the intelligence agencies of various South American countries, assisted by a United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) communication base in Panama. Pinochet justified these operations as being necessary in order to save the country from communism.

Some political scientists have ascribed the relative bloodiness of the coup to the stability of the existing democratic system, which required extreme action to overturn. Some of the most famous cases of human rights violations occurred during the early period: in October 1973, at least 70 people were killed throughout the country by the Caravan of Death. Charles Horman, a US journalist, "disappeared", as did Víctor Olea Alegría, a member of the Socialist Party, and many others, in 1973. Mathematician Boris Weisfeiler is thought to have disappeared near Colonia Dignidad, a German colony founded by anti-Communist Paul Schäfer in Chile, which was used as a detention center by the DINA, the secret police.

Furthermore, many other important officials of Allende's government were tracked down by the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) during Operation Condor. Thus, General Carlos Prats, Pinochet's predecessor and army commander under Allende, who had resigned rather than support the moves against Allende's government, was assassinated by a car bomb in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1974. A year later, the deaths of 119 opponents abroad were claimed as the product of infighting between Marxist factions, the DINA setting up a disinformation campaign to propagate this thesis, Operation Colombo. The campaign was legitimized and supported by the leading newspaper in Chile, ''El Mercurio''.

Other victims of Condor included, among hundreds of less famous persons, Juan José Torres, the former President of Bolivia, assassinated in Buenos Aires on 2 June 1976; Carmelo Soria, a UN diplomat working for the CEPAL, assassinated in July 1976; and Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States and minister in Allende's cabinet, assassinated after his release from internment and exile in Washington D.C. by a car bomb on 21 September 1976. This led to strained relations with the US and to the extradition of Michael Townley, a US citizen who worked for the DINA and had organized Letelier's assassination. Other targeted victims, who escaped assassination, included Christian-Democrat politician Bernardo Leighton, who barely escaped an assassination attempt in Rome in 1975 by the Italian neo-fascist terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie (the assassination attempt seriously injured Leighton and his wife, Anita Fresno, leaving her permanently disabled); Carlos Altamirano, the leader of the Chilean Socialist Party, targeted for murder in 1975 by Pinochet, along with Volodia Teitelboim, writer and member of the Communist Party; Pascal Allende, the nephew of Salvador Allende and president of the MIR, who escaped an assassination attempt in Costa Rica in March 1976; and US Congressman Edward Koch, who became aware in 2001 of the relationship between death threats he received and his denunciation of Operation Condor. Furthermore, according to current investigations, Eduardo Frei Montalva, the Christian Democrat President of Chile from 1964 to 1970, may have been poisoned in 1982 by a toxin produced by DINA biochemist Eugenio Berrios. Berríos himself is reputed to having been assassinated by Chilean intelligence in Uruguay, after being spirited away to said country in the early 1990s.

Protests continued, however, during the 1980s, leading to several scandals. In March 1985, the gruesome murder of three Communist Party of Chile (PCC) members led to the resignation of César Mendoza, head of the Chilean gendarmerie the Carabineros de Chile and member of the ''junta'' since its formation. During a 1986 protest against Pinochet, 21-year-old American photographer Rodrigo Rojas DeNegri and 18-year-old student Carmen Gloria Quintana were burnt alive, killing Rojas.

In August 1989, Marcelo Barrios Andres, a 21-year-old member of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR, the armed wing of the PCC, created in 1983, which had attempted to assassinate Pinochet on 7 September 1986), was assassinated by a group of military personnel who were supposed to arrest him on orders of Valparaíso's public prosecutor. However, they simply summarily executed him; this case was included in the Rettig Report.Capítulos desconocidos de los mercenarios chilenos en Honduras camino de Iraq
, ''La Nación'', 25 September 2005 – URL accessed on 14 February 2007 Among the killed and disappeared during the military dictatorship were 440 MIR guerrillas.

China

Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, along with his family, was taken into custody by the Chinese government shortly after being identified as the 11th Panchen Lama by the 14th (and current) Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. In his place, the Chinese government appointed Gyaincain Norbu to act as the Panchen Lama, though Norbu is not recognized as the Panchen Lama in Tibet or elsewhere (beyond China). Nyima has not been seen in public since he was taken into custody, though the Chinese government claims that he is alive and well, but that he "does not wish to be disturbed".

Hong Kong

Lee Bo (李波) was a dual citizen of Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. On 30 December 2015 evening, Lee disappeared. His wife shortly received a phone call from him (with caller ID from Shenzhen) in which he explained in Mandarin (not Cantonese in which they would usually converse) he had to assist with some investigation for a while, and he could not be home nor provide more information for a while.

Lee was a co-owner of the Causeway Bay Books and the Might Current publishing house that specialized in selling books concerning the political gossip and other lurid subjects of the Chinese Communist Party leaders. These books were banned from mainland China but were popular among the tourists visiting Hong Kong. Towards the end of October 2015, four co-owners and managers of the bookstore and publisher, Gui Minhai, Lui Bo (呂波), Cheung Jiping (張志平), and Lam Wing-kei, went missing from Thailand and mainland China, believed to be detained by the Central Case Examination Group. Lee had expressed concern for his safety in various interviews after his colleagues disappeared and intentionally left all travel documents at home (confirmed by his wife after his disappearance).

Lee's disappearance drew wide attention. The disappearance of all five men were speculated to be connected to some upcoming news releases that would have embarrassed the Chinese Communist Party. Hong Kong citizens, under one-country two-systems, are supposedly to be protected by the Basic Law in that PRC law enforcement cannot operate in the special administrative region (SAR). Most laws in mainland China do not apply. Lee's disappearance was considered a threat to Article 27 and most importantly the many rights, freedom, and protection promised to Hong Kong citizens often denied in mainland China.

Colombia

In 2009, Colombian prosecutors reported that an estimated 28,000 people have disappeared due to paramilitary and guerrilla groups during the nation's ongoing internal conflict. In 2008, the corpses of 300 victims were identified and 600 more during the following year. According to Colombian officials, it