An enforced disappearance (or forced disappearance) is the secret abduction or imprisonment of a person by a
state
State may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''State Magazine'', a monthly magazine published by the U.S. Department of State
* ''The State'' (newspaper), a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, United States
* ''Our S ...
or
political organization
A political organization is any organization that involves itself in the political process, including political parties, non-governmental organizations, and special interest advocacy groups. Political organizations are those engaged in poli ...
, 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
Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic acts committed by or on behalf of a ''de facto'' authority, usually a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity do not have to take place within the ...
, not subject to a
statute of limitations
A statute of limitations, known in civil law systems as a prescriptive period, is a law passed by a legislative body to set the maximum time after an event within which legal proceedings may be initiated. ("Time for commencing proceedings") In ...
, in
international criminal law
International criminal law (ICL) is a body of public international law designed to prohibit certain categories of conduct commonly viewed as serious atrocities and to make perpetrators of such conduct criminally accountable for their perpetrat ...
. On 20 December 2006, the
United Nations General Assembly
The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA or GA; french: link=no, Assemblée générale, AG) is one of the six principal organs of the United Nations (UN), serving as the main deliberative, policymaking, and representative organ of the UN. Curr ...
adopted the
.
Often, forced disappearance implies murder: a victim is
abducted, may be illegally
detained and often
torture
Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogational torture, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. definitions of tortur ...
d 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
The Dirty War ( es, Guerra sucia) is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina ( es, dictadura cívico-militar de Argentina, links=no) for the period of state terrorism in Argentina from 1974 to 1983 as ...
in Argentina.
Human rights law
In
international human rights law
International human rights law (IHRL) is the body of international law designed to promote human rights on social, regional, and domestic levels. As a form of international law, international human rights law are primarily made up of treaties, a ...
, 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
''Nacht und Nebel'' (German: ), meaning Night and Fog, was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, who were to ...
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
, 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 The International Coalition against Enforced Disappearances (ICAED) gathers organizations of families of disappeared and human rights NGOs working in a nonviolent manner against the practice of enforced disappearances at the local, national and int ...
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
Fundamental may refer to:
* Foundation of reality
* Fundamental frequency, as in music or phonetics, often referred to as simply a "fundamental"
* Fundamentalism, the belief in, and usually the strict adherence to, the simple or "fundamental" idea ...
human rights declared in the
United Nations
The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoniz ...
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). For the disappeared person, these include the
right to liberty
Liberty is the ability to do as one pleases, or a right or immunity enjoyed by prescription or by grant (i.e. privilege). It is a synonym for the word freedom.
In modern politics, liberty is understood as the state of being free within society f ...
, the right to personal security and humane treatment (including freedom from torture), the
right to a fair trial, to
legal counsel
A lawyer is a person who Practice of law, practices law. The role of a lawyer varies greatly across different Jurisdiction, legal jurisdictions. A lawyer can be classified as an advocate, attorney at law, attorney, barrister, canonist, canon l ...
and to
equal protection
The Equal Protection Clause is part of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides "''nor shall any State ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal ...
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
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). It was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome, Italy on 17 July 1998Michael P. Scharf (August 1998)''Results of the R ...
establishing the
International Criminal Court
The International Criminal Court (ICC or ICCt) is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal seated in The Hague, Netherlands. It is the first and only permanent international court with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals f ...
, enforced disappearances constitute a
crime against humanity
Crimes against humanity are widespread or systemic acts committed by or on behalf of a ''de facto'' authority, usually a state, that grossly violate human rights. Unlike war crimes, crimes against humanity do not have to take place within the ...
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
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (french: Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789, links=no), set by France's National Constituent Assembly in 1789, is a human civil rights document from the French Revolu ...
, formulated on 26 August 1789 in France by the authorities that emerged from the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
, 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
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement is a humanitarian movement with approximately 97 million volunteers, members and staff worldwide. It was founded to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for all human beings, and ...
in 1859, and the first international typification of abuses and crimes in the form of the 1864 Geneva Conventions. After the
Second World War
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
, in 1946, the
Nuremberg trials
The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II.
Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded m ...
brought to public attention the breadth of the ''
Nacht und Nebel
''Nacht und Nebel'' (German: ), meaning Night and Fog, was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, who were to ...
'' 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
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
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
Natzweiler-Struthof was a Nazi concentration camp located in the Vosges Mountains close to the villages of Natzweiler and Struthof in the Gau Baden-Alsace of Germany, on territory annexed from France on a basis in 1940. It operated from 21 Ma ...
, 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
Wilhelm Bodewin Johann Gustav Keitel (; 22 September 188216 October 1946) was a German field marshal and war criminal who held office as chief of the '' Oberkommando der Wehrmacht'' (OKW), the high command of Nazi Germany's Armed Forces, duri ...
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
The United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) was a functional commission within the overall framework of the United Nations from 1946 until it was replaced by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2006. It was a subsidiary body of ...
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
Felix Ermacora (13 October 1923 – 24 February 1995) was a leading human rights expert of Austria and a member of the Austrian People's Party.
Biography
In his youth, Ermacora served in the army of Nazi Germany at the rank of private.
He wa ...
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
, image_flag = Flag of Peru.svg
, image_coat = Escudo nacional del Perú.svg
, other_symbol = Great Seal of the State
, other_symbol_type = National seal
, national_motto = "Firm and Happy f ...
, 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
Kofi Atta Annan (; 8 April 193818 August 2018) was a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations from 1997 to 2006. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. He was the founde ...
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
Iraq,; ku, عێراق, translit=Êraq officially the Republic of Iraq, '; ku, کۆماری عێراق, translit=Komarî Êraq is a country in Western Asia. It is bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, the Persian Gulf and K ...
(16,544),
Sri Lanka (12,226),
Argentina
Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...
(3,449),
Guatemala (3,155),
Peru
, image_flag = Flag of Peru.svg
, image_coat = Escudo nacional del Perú.svg
, other_symbol = Great Seal of the State
, other_symbol_type = National seal
, national_motto = "Firm and Happy f ...
(3,009),
Algeria
)
, image_map = Algeria (centered orthographic projection).svg
, map_caption =
, image_map2 =
, capital = Algiers
, coordinates =
, largest_city = capital
, relig ...
(2,939),
El Salvador (2,661) and
Colombia (1,235). Other countries with numerous cases under denunciation (between 1000 and 100) are:
Chile
Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...
(907),
China (116),
Congo (114),
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
(119),
Philippines
The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no),
* bik, Republika kan Filipinas
* ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas
* cbk, República de Filipinas
* hil, Republ ...
(780),
Honduras (207),
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
(430),
Indonesia
Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...
(165),
Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
(532),
Lebanon
Lebanon ( , ar, لُبْنَان, translit=lubnān, ), officially the Republic of Lebanon () or the Lebanese Republic, is a country in Western Asia. It is located between Syria to Lebanon–Syria border, the north and east and Israel to Blue ...
(320),
Morocco
Morocco (),, ) officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is the westernmost country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It overlooks the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria t ...
(268),
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
(392),
Nepal
Nepal (; ne, :ne:नेपाल, नेपाल ), formerly the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal ( ne,
सङ्घीय लोकतान्त्रिक गणतन्त्र नेपाल ), is a landlocked country in S ...
(672),
Nicaragua
Nicaragua (; ), officially the Republic of Nicaragua (), is the largest country in Central America, bordered by Honduras to the north, the Caribbean to the east, Costa Rica to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Managua is the countr ...
(234),
Russian Federation
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. It is the largest country in the world, with its internationally recognised territory covering , and encompassing one-eig ...
(478),
Sudan,
Yemen
Yemen (; ar, ٱلْيَمَن, al-Yaman), officially the Republic of Yemen,, ) is a country in Western Asia. It is situated on the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, and borders Saudi Arabia to the Saudi Arabia–Yemen border, north and ...
(155) and
East Timor
East Timor (), also known as Timor-Leste (), officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, is an island country in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the exclave of Oecusse on the island's north-west ...
(504).
Examples
NGOs such as
Amnesty International or
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human r ...
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
![Bandera de los Desaparecidos - Día de la Memoria](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Bandera_de_los_Desaparecidos_-_D%C3%ADa_de_la_Memoria.jpg)
During
Argentina
Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...
's
Dirty War
The Dirty War ( es, Guerra sucia) is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina ( es, dictadura cívico-militar de Argentina, links=no) for the period of state terrorism in Argentina from 1974 to 1983 as ...
and
Operation Condor
Operation Condor ( es, link=no, Operación Cóndor, also known as ''Plan Cóndor''; pt, Operação Condor) was a United States–backed campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of op ...
, many alleged political
dissident
A dissident is a person who actively challenges an established political or religious system, doctrine, belief, policy, or institution. In a religious context, the word has been used since the 18th century, and in the political sense since the 20th ...
s 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
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is an Argentine human rights association formed in response to the National Reorganization Process, the military dictatorship by Jorge Rafael Videla, with the goal of finding the '' desaparecidos'', initially, a ...
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
Jorge Rafael Videla (; ; 2 August 1925 – 17 May 2013) was an Argentine military officer and dictator, Commander in Chief of the Army, member of the Military Junta, and ''de facto'' President of Argentina from 29 March 1976 to 29 March 1981. H ...
, 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
Bangladesh (}, ), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the eighth-most populous country in the world, with a population exceeding 165 million people in an area of . Bangladesh is among the mos ...
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
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party ( bn, বাংলাদেশ জাতীয়তাবাদী দল, Bangladesh Jātīyotābādī Dol; BNP) is a centre-right to right-wing nationalist, political party in Bangladesh and one of the major ...
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
![Zniknąć 03 - Czarownik ciągnie za uszy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Znikn%C4%85%C4%87_03_-_Czarownik_ci%C4%85gnie_za_uszy.jpg)
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
Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko (as transliterated from Russian; also transliterated from Belarusian as Alyaksand(a)r Ryhoravich Lukashenka;, ; rus, Александр Григорьевич Лукашенко, Aleksandr Grigoryevich Luk ...
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
Alija Izetbegović (; ; 8 August 1925 – 19 October 2003) was a Bosnian politician, lawyer, Islamic philosopher and author, who in 1992 became the first president of the Presidency of the newly independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovin ...
, 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
The Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina ( bs, Armija Republike Bosne i Hercegovine or ARBiH), often referred to as Bosnian Army, was the military force of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was established by the government of ...
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
The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina ( sh-Latn-Cyrl, separator=" / ", Republika Bosna i Hercegovina, Република Босна и Херцеговина) was a state in Southeastern Europe, existing from 1992 to 1995. It is the direct lega ...
), was responsible for the kidnap, torture and disappearance through death flights of captured Serb fighters in the war.
Mostar Airport
Mostar International Airport ( hr, Međunarodna Zračna Luka Mostar, bs, Međunarodni Aerodrom Mostar; ) is an airport near Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the village of Ortiješ, southeast of Mostar's railway station.
History
Mostar Air ...
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
A military junta () is a government led by a committee of military leaders. The term ''junta'' means "meeting" or "committee" and originated in the national and local junta organized by the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's invasion of Spain in ...
led by the then
commander-in-chief Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (, , , ; 25 November 1915 – 10 December 2006) was a Chilean general who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, first as the leader of the Military Junta of Chile from 1973 to 1981, being declared President of ...
banned all the leftist parties that had constituted the democratically elected president
Salvador Allende
Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens (, , ; 26 June 1908 – 11 September 1973) was a Chilean physician and socialist politician who served as the 28th president of Chile from 3 November 1970 until his death on 11 September 1973. He was the fir ...
'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
The Rettig Report, officially The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, is a 1991 report by a commission designated by Chilean President Patricio Aylwin (from the ''Concertación'') detailing human rights abuses resulting in dea ...
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
The Valech Report (officially The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report) is a record of abuses committed in Chile between 1973 and 1990 by agents of Augusto Pinochet's military regime. The report was published on November ...
, while 1,312 were exiled. The latter were chased all over the world by the
intelligence agencies
An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, public safety, and foreign policy objectives.
Means of informatio ...
. In
Latin America
Latin America or
* french: Amérique Latine, link=no
* ht, Amerik Latin, link=no
* pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived f ...
, this was made under the auspices of
Operation Condor
Operation Condor ( es, link=no, Operación Cóndor, also known as ''Plan Cóndor''; pt, Operação Condor) was a United States–backed campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of op ...
, a combined operation between the intelligence agencies of various South American countries, assisted by a United States
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...
(CIA) communication base in
Panama
Panama ( , ; es, link=no, Panamá ), officially the Republic of Panama ( es, República de Panamá), is a transcontinental country spanning the southern part of North America and the northern part of South America. It is bordered by Co ...
.
Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (, , , ; 25 November 1915 – 10 December 2006) was a Chilean general who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990, first as the leader of the Military Junta of Chile from 1973 to 1981, being declared President of ...
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
Socialist Party is the name of many different political parties around the world. All of these parties claim to uphold some form of socialism, though they may have very different interpretations of what "socialism" means. Statistically, most of t ...
, and many others, in 1973. Mathematician
Boris Weisfeiler is thought to have disappeared near
Colonia Dignidad
Colonia Dignidad ("Dignity Colony") was an isolated colony of Germans established in post- World War II Chile by emigrant Germans which became notorious for the internment, torture, and murder of dissidents during the military dictatorship of ...
, a German colony founded by anti-Communist
Paul Schäfer
Paul Schäfer Schneider (4 December 1921 – 24 April 2010) was a Nazi, child rapist, German-Chilean Christian minister and the founder and leader of a sect and agricultural commune of 300 German immigrants called Colonia Dignidad (''Dignity ...
in Chile, which was used as a detention center by the
DINA, the secret police.
![Parque por la paz Villa Grimaldi](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Parque_por_la_paz_Villa_Grimaldi.jpg)
Furthermore, many other important officials of Allende's government were tracked down by the
Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) during
Operation Condor
Operation Condor ( es, link=no, Operación Cóndor, also known as ''Plan Cóndor''; pt, Operação Condor) was a United States–backed campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of op ...
. Thus, General
Carlos Prats
Carlos Prats González (; February 24, 1915 – September 30, 1974) was a Chilean Army officer and politician. He served as a minister in Salvador Allende's government while Commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army. Immediately after General August ...
, 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
Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...
,
Argentina
Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...
, 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 Operation Colombo was an operation undertaken by the DINA (the Chilean secret police) in 1975 to make political dissidents disappear. At least 119 people are alleged to have been abducted and later killed. The magazines published a list of 119 de ...
. The campaign was legitimized and supported by the leading newspaper in Chile, ''
El Mercurio
''El Mercurio'' (known online as ''El Mercurio On-Line'', ''EMOL'') is a Chilean newspaper with editions in Valparaíso and Santiago. Its Santiago edition is considered the country's newspaper of record and it is considered the oldest daily in ...
''.
Other victims of
Condor
Condor is the common name for two species of New World vultures, each in a monotypic genus. The name derives from the Quechua ''kuntur''. They are the largest flying land birds in the Western Hemisphere.
They are:
* The Andean condor (''Vu ...
included, among hundreds of less famous persons,
Juan José Torres
Juan José Torres González (5 March 1920 – 2 June 1976) was a Bolivian socialist politician and military leader who served as the 50th president of Bolivia from 1970 to 1971, when he was ousted in a US-supported coup that resulted in ...
, the former
President of Bolivia
The president of Bolivia ( es, Presidente de Bolivia), officially known as the president of the Plurinational State of Bolivia ( es, Presidente del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia), is head of state and head of government of Bolivia and the ca ...
, assassinated in
Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...
on 2 June 1976;
Carmelo Soria, a UN diplomat working for the
CEPAL, assassinated in July 1976; and
Orlando Letelier
Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar (13 April 1932 – 21 September 1976) was a Chilean economist, politician and diplomat during the presidency of Salvador Allende. A refugee from the Military government of Chile (1973–1990), military dictato ...
, a former Chilean
ambassador to the
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
and minister in Allende's cabinet,
assassinated after his release from internment and exile in
Washington D.C.
)
, image_skyline =
, image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...
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
Bernardo Leighton Guzmán (August 16, 1909, Negrete, Bío Bío Province – January 26, 1995, Santiago) was a Chilean Christian Democratic Party politician and lawyer. He served as minister of state under three presidents over a 36-year care ...
, who barely escaped an assassination attempt in
Rome
, established_title = Founded
, established_date = 753 BC
, founder = King Romulus (legendary)
, image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg
, map_caption ...
in 1975 by the
Italian
Italian(s) may refer to:
* Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries
** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom
** Italian language, a Romance language
*** Regional Ita ...
neo-fascist terrorist
Stefano delle Chiaie
Stefano Delle Chiaie (13 September 1936, Caserta – 10 September 2019, Rome) was an Italian neo-fascist terrorist. He was the founder of ''Avanguardia Nazionale'', a member of '' Ordine Nuovo'', and founder of Lega nazionalpopolare. He went on ...
(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 Volodia Teitelboim.
Volodia Teitelboim Volosky (originally ''Valentín Teitelboim Volosky''; March 17, 1916 – January 31, 2008) was a Chilean communist politician, lawyer, and author.
Personal life
Born in Chillán to Jewish immigrants (Ukrainia ...
, writer and member of the
Communist Party
A communist party is a political party that seeks to realize the socio-economic goals of communism. The term ''communist party'' was popularized by the title of ''The Manifesto of the Communist Party'' (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. ...
;
Pascal Allende, the nephew of
Salvador Allende
Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens (, , ; 26 June 1908 – 11 September 1973) was a Chilean physician and socialist politician who served as the 28th president of Chile from 3 November 1970 until his death on 11 September 1973. He was the fir ...
and president of the
MIR
''Mir'' (russian: Мир, ; ) was a space station that operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001, operated by the Soviet Union and later by Russia. ''Mir'' was the first modular space station and was assembled in orbit from 1986 to&n ...
, who escaped an assassination attempt in
Costa Rica in March 1976; and US Congressman
Edward Koch
Edward Irving Koch ( ; December 12, 1924February 1, 2013) was an American politician, lawyer, political commentator, film critic, and television personality. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1969 to 1977 and was mayo ...
, 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
Eduardo Nicanor Frei Montalva (; 16 January 1911 – 22 January 1982) was a Chilean political leader. In his long political career, he was Minister of Public Works, president of his Christian Democratic Party, senator, President of the ...
, the
Christian Democrat
Christian democracy (sometimes named Centrist democracy) is a political ideology that emerged in 19th-century Europe under the influence of Catholic social teaching and neo-Calvinism.
It was conceived as a combination of modern democratic ...
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
Uruguay (; ), officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay ( es, República Oriental del Uruguay), is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast; while bordering ...
, after being spirited away to said country in the early 1990s.
![Facultad de Derecho UdeCh 20180117 fRF11 -memoria feminista](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Facultad_de_Derecho_UdeCh_20180117_fRF11_-memoria_feminista.jpg)
Protests continued, however, during the 1980s, leading to several scandals. In March 1985, the
gruesome murder of three
Communist Party of Chile
The Communist Party of Chile ( es, Partido Comunista de Chile, ) is a communist party in Chile. It was founded in 1912 as the Socialist Workers' Party () and adopted its current name in 1922. The party established a youth wing, the Communist Youth ...
(PCC) members led to the resignation of
César Mendoza, head of the Chilean
gendarmerie the
Carabineros de Chile
( en, Carabiniers of Chile) are the Chilean national law enforcement police, who have jurisdiction over the entire national territory of the Republic of Chile. Created in 1927, their mission is to maintain order and enforce the laws of Chile. T ...
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
The Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (in es, link=no, Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez, ''FPMR'') was a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organisation officially founded on 14 December 1983 as the paramilitary arm of the Communist Party of Chil ...
(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
A summary execution is an execution in which a person is accused of a crime and immediately killed without the benefit of a full and fair trial. Executions as the result of summary justice (such as a drumhead court-martial) are sometimes include ...
him; this case was included in the Rettig Report.
[Capítulos desconocidos de los mercenarios chilenos en Honduras camino de Iraq](_blank)
, ''La Nación
''La Nación'' () is an Argentine daily newspaper. As the country's leading conservative newspaper, ''La Nación''s main competitor is the more liberal '' Clarín''. It is regarded as a newspaper of record for Argentina.
Its motto is: "''La Na ...
'', 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
The Panchen Lama () is a tulku of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism. Panchen Lama is one of the most important figures in the Gelug tradition, with its spiritual authority second only to Dalai Lama. Along with the council of high lamas, h ...
by the 14th (and current)
Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama (, ; ) is a title given by the Tibetan people to the foremost spiritual leader of the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" school of Tibetan Buddhism, the newest and most dominant of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th and current D ...
,
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
Dual or Duals may refer to:
Paired/two things
* Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another
** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality
*** see more cases in :Duality theories
* Dual (grammatical ...
of
Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta i ...
and the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
. On 30 December 2015 evening, Lee disappeared. His wife shortly received a phone call from him (with
caller ID
Caller identification (Caller ID) is a telephone service, available in analog and digital telephone systems, including voice over IP (VoIP), that transmits a caller's telephone number to the called party's telephone equipment when the call i ...
from
Shenzhen
Shenzhen (; ; ; ), also historically known as Sham Chun, is a major sub-provincial city and one of the special economic zones of China. The city is located on the east bank of the Pearl River estuary on the central coast of southern province ...
) in which he explained in
Mandarin (not
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding ar ...
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
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the CCP emerged victorious in the Chinese Civil ...
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
Gui Minhai (, formerly ; born 5 May 1964), also known as Michael Gui, is a Chinese-born Swedish book publisher and writer. He is an author of many books related to Chinese politics and Chinese political figures; Gui authored around 200 books ...
, 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
The Central Case Examination Group (; CCEG) was a special organization established in the People's Republic of China in 1966 under the aegis of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to persecute those accused of "anti-part ...
. 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
"Mainland China" is a geopolitical term defined as the territory governed by the People's Republic of China (including islands like Hainan or Chongming), excluding dependent territories of the PRC, and other territories within Greater 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
An internal conflict is the struggle occurring within a character's mind. Things such as the character views for, but can't quite reach. As opposed to external conflict, in which a character is grappling some force of themself, such as wars or a c ...
. In 2008, the corpses of 300 victims were identified and 600 more during the following year. According to Colombian officials, it will take many years before all the bodies that have been recovered are identified.
Egypt
Enforced disappearance has been employed by the Egyptian authorities under the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as a key instrument to terrify, interrogate and torture El-Sisi opponents while using counter-terrorism as an excuse.
Hundreds of people forcibly disappeared including political activists, protesters, women and children. Around three to four people are seized per day by the heavily armed security forces led by NSA officers who usually storm their homes, detain many of them, blindfold and handcuff them for months.
378 individuals have forcibly disappeared between 1 August 2016 and mid-August 2017. 291 people have been located, while the rest are still forcibly disappeared. Of the 52 children who disappeared in 2017, three were extrajudicially killed.
In 2020, the
Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms (ECRF) released a five-year report on forced disappearances, revealing that the country documented 2,723 such cases since August 2015.
In March 2021,
Amnesty International condemned Egyptian authorities for the forced disappearance of a husband and wife, Omar Abdelhamid Abu el-Naga and Manar Adel Abu el-Naga, along with their one-year-old child, al-Baraa, after being arrested on 9 March 2019. On 20 February 2021, the wife was questioned about having links to a terrorist group before the Supreme State Security Prosecution (SSSP). She was detained for 15 days pending further investigations at al-Qanater women's prison, while her almost 3-year-old son was handed over to relatives. However, Omar continued to be subjected to enforced disappearance.
Amnesty urged Egypt to conduct an effective investigation into the disappearance of the family, saying, "Seizing a young mother with her one-year-old baby and confining them in a room for 23 months outside the protection of the law and with no contact with the outside world show that Egyptian authorities' ongoing campaign to stamp out dissent and instil fear has reached a new level of brutality."
El Salvador
According to the
UN Working Group against Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, enforced disappearances were systematically carried out in El Salvador both prior to (starting in 1978) and during the
Salvadoran Civil War
The Salvadoran Civil War ( es, guerra civil de El Salvador) was a twelve year period of civil war in El Salvador that was fought between the government of El Salvador and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front
The Farabundo Ma ...
. Salvadoran non-governmental organizations estimate that more than 8,000 disappearances occurred, and in the Report of the
Commission on the Truth for El Salvador
The Truth Commission for El Salvador ( es, Comisión de la Verdad para El Salvador) was a restorative justice truth commission approved by the United Nations to investigate the grave wrongdoings that occurred throughout the country's twelve year ...
, it is estimated that more than 5,500 persons may have been the victims of enforced disappearance. The Office of the Procurator for the Protection of Human Rights of El Salvador claims that
Enforced disappearances of children occurred, which is thought to have been "part of a deliberate strategy within the violence institutionalized by the State during the period of conflict".
Equatorial Guinea
According to the UN Human Rights Council Mission to
Equatorial Guinea, agents of the Equatorial Guinean Government have been responsible for abducting refugees from other countries in the region, and holding them in secret detention. For example, in January 2010 four men were abducted from
Benin
Benin ( , ; french: Bénin , ff, Benen), officially the Republic of Benin (french: République du Bénin), and formerly Dahomey, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Togo to the west, Nigeria to the east, Burkina Faso to the nort ...
by Equatorial Guinean security forces, held in secret detention, subjected to
torture
Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogational torture, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. definitions of tortur ...
, and executed in August 2010 immediately after being convicted by a military court.
Germany
During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
,
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
set up secret police forces, including branches of the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...
in occupied countries, to hunt down known or suspected dissidents or partisans. This tactic was given the name ''
Nacht und Nebel
''Nacht und Nebel'' (German: ), meaning Night and Fog, was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, who were to ...
'' (''Night and Fog''), to describe those who disappeared after being arrested by Nazi forces without any warning. The Nazis applied this policy against
political opponents within Germany as well as against the
resistance in
occupied Europe
German-occupied Europe refers to the sovereign countries of Europe which were wholly or partly occupied and civil-occupied (including puppet governments) by the military forces and the government of Nazi Germany at various times between 1939 an ...
. Most victims were
killed on the spot, or sent to
concentration camp
Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simpl ...
s, with the full expectation that they would then be killed.
Guatemala
Guatemala was one of the first countries where people were disappeared as a generalized practice of terror against a civilian population. Forced disappearances was widely practiced by the United States-backed military government of Guatemala during the 36-year
Guatemalan Civil War
The Guatemalan Civil War was a civil war in Guatemala fought from 1960 to 1996 between the government of Guatemala and various leftist rebel groups. The government forces have been condemned for committing genocide against the Maya population of ...
.
An estimated 40,000 to 50,000 individuals were disappeared by the Guatemalan military and security forces between 1954 and 1996. The tactic of disappearance first saw widespread use in Guatemala during the mid-1960s, as government repression became widespread when the military adopted harsher counterinsurgency measures. The first documented case of forced disappearance by the government in Guatemala occurred in March 1966, when thirty
Guatemalan Party of Labour
The Guatemalan Labour Party (''Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo'') was a communist party in Guatemala. It existed from 1949 to 1998. It gained prominence during the government of Jacobo Arbenz. It was one of the main forces of opposition to the ...
associates were kidnapped, tortured and killed by the security forces; their bodies were put in sacks and dumped at sea from helicopters. This was one of the first major instances of forced disappearance in Latin American history. When law students at the University of San Carlos used legal measures (such as ''
habeas corpus
''Habeas corpus'' (; from Medieval Latin, ) is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, t ...
'' petitions) to require the government to present the detainees at court, some of the students were "disappeared" in turn.
India
Ensaaf, a nonprofit organization working to end impunity and achieve justice for mass state crimes in India, with a focus on Punjab, released a report in January 2009, in collaboration with the
Benetech
Benetech is a nonprofit social enterprise organization that empowers communities with software for social good. Previous projects include the Route 66 Literacy Project, the Miradi environmental project management software, Martus (human rights ab ...
Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), claiming "verifiable quantitative" findings on mass disappearances and extrajudicial executions in the Indian state of
Punjab
Punjab (; Punjabi: پنجاب ; ਪੰਜਾਬ ; ; also romanised as ''Panjāb'' or ''Panj-Āb'') is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising a ...
.
[Ensaaf and the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG)]
Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India: A Preliminary Quantitative Analysis
26 January 2009. It claims that in conflict-afflicted states like Punjab, Indian security forces have perpetrated gross human rights violations with impunity. The report by Ensaaf and HRDAG, "Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India", presents empirical findings suggesting that the intensification of
counterinsurgency
Counterinsurgency (COIN) is "the totality of actions aimed at defeating irregular forces". The Oxford English Dictionary defines counterinsurgency as any "military or political action taken against the activities of guerrillas or revolutionari ...
operations in Punjab in the 1980s to 1990s was accompanied by a shift in state violence from targeted lethal human rights violations to systematic enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions, accompanied by mass "illegal cremations".
Furthermore, there is key evidence suggesting security forces tortured, executed, and disappeared tens of thousands of people in Punjab from 1984 to 1995.
In 2011, the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) recommended the identification of 2,156 people buried in unmarked graves in north
Kashmir. The graves were found in dozens of villages on the Indian side of the
Line of Control, the border that has divided India and Pakistan since 1972. According to a report published by the commission, many of the bodies were likely to be those of civilians who disappeared more than a decade earlier in a brutal insurgency. "There is every probability that these unidentified dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves at 38 places of North Kashmir may contain the dead bodies of enforced disappearances", the report stated.
Indonesia
According to historian John Roosa, the first example of forced disappearances being used as a weapon of terror in Asia occurred during the
Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66
The Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, also known as the Indonesian genocide, Indonesian Communist Purge, or Indonesian politicide ( id, Pembunuhan Massal Indonesia & Pembersihan G.30.S/PKI), were large-scale killings and civil unrest pr ...
.
Iraq
At least tens of thousands of people disappeared under the regime of
Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein ( ; ar, صدام حسين, Ṣaddām Ḥusayn; 28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was an Iraqi politician who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolutio ...
, many of them during
Operation Anfal.
On 15 December 2019, two Iraqi activists and friends – Salman Khairallah Salman and Omar al-Amri – disappeared amidst ongoing protests in
Baghdad
Baghdad (; ar, بَغْدَاد , ) is the capital of Iraq and the second-largest city in the Arab world after Cairo. It is located on the Tigris near the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon and the Sassanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon. I ...
. The family and friends of the two fear the disappearance of more people following
United Nations' warning to security forces and other unnamed militia groups, of carrying out a campaign of kidnapping and 'deliberate killings' in
Iraq
Iraq,; ku, عێراق, translit=Êraq officially the Republic of Iraq, '; ku, کۆماری عێراق, translit=Komarî Êraq is a country in Western Asia. It is bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, the Persian Gulf and K ...
.
Iran
Following the
Iran student riots in 1999, more than 70 students disappeared. In addition to an estimated 1,200–1,400 detained, the "whereabouts and condition" of five students named by
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human r ...
remained unknown. The United Nations has also reported other disappearances. After each manifestation, from teacher unions to women's rights activists, at least some disappearances are expected. Dissident writers have been the target of disappearances, as have members of religious minorities such as the
Baháʼí Faith
The Baháʼí Faith is a religion founded in the 19th century that teaches the essential worth of all religions and the unity of all people. Established by Baháʼu'lláh in the 19th century, it initially developed in Iran and parts of the ...
following the
Iranian Revolution
The Iranian Revolution ( fa, انقلاب ایران, Enqelâb-e Irân, ), also known as the Islamic Revolution ( fa, انقلاب اسلامی, Enqelâb-e Eslâmī), was a series of events that culminated in the overthrow of the Pahlavi dyna ...
. Examples include Muhammad Movahhed and
Ali Murad Davudi
Dr Ali Murad Davudi (1922–1979?) was an Iranian Baháʼí who was a member of the national governing body of the Baháʼís in Iran. He was a professor at Tehran University in the philosophy department. In 1979, during a wave of persecuti ...
.
Mexico
![Ayotzinapa- visita del mecanismo de seguimiento (36133322213)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Ayotzinapa-_visita_del_mecanismo_de_seguimiento_%2836133322213%29.jpg)
During Mexico's
Dirty War
The Dirty War ( es, Guerra sucia) is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina ( es, dictadura cívico-militar de Argentina, links=no) for the period of state terrorism in Argentina from 1974 to 1983 as ...
in the 1970s, thousands of suspected guerrillas, leftists, and human rights defenders disappeared, although the exact number is unclear. During the 1970s, around 470 people were disappeared in the municipality of
Atoyac de Álvarez
Atoyac de Álvarez is a city and seat of the municipality of Atoyac de Álvarez, in the state of Guerrero, south-western Mexico
Mexico (Spanish language, Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a List of sovereign sta ...
alone.
According to the National Commission of Human Rights
CNDH, between 2006 and 2011, 5,397 people have disappeared. Of these, 3,457 are men, 1,885 are women, but there is no information about the other 55 (sourc
BBC.
Usually, the forced disappearances occur in groups and are on people not related to the
drug war which was started by President
Felipe Calderón
Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa (; born 18 August 1962) is a Mexican politician who served as the 63rd president of Mexico from 1 December 2006 to 30 November 2012 and Secretary of Energy during the presidency of Vicente Fox between 2003 ...
in 2006. The main difference from the kidnappings is that usually there is no ransom asked for the disappeared.
Over 73,000 people in Mexico have been reported as disappeared in 2020, according to the Secretaría de Gobernación of Mexico.
Morocco / Western Sahara
![Malika oufkir 2006](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Malika_oufkir_2006.jpg)
Several Moroccan Army personnel suspected of being implicated in the 1970s coups against the King were held in secret detention camps such as
Tazmamart, where some of them died due to poor conditions or lack of medical treatment.
The most famous case of forced disappearance in Morocco is that of political dissident
Mehdi Ben Barka use both this parameter and , birth_date to display the person's date of birth, date of death, and age at death) -->
, death_place =
, death_cause =
, body_discovered =
, resting_place =
, resting_place_coordinates = ...
, who disappeared in obscure circumstances in France in 1965.
In February 2007, Morocco signed an international convention protecting people against forced disappearance.
In October 2007, Spanish judge
Baltasar Garzón
Baltasar Garzón Real (; born 26 October 1955) is a former Spanish judge. Garzón formerly served on Spain's central criminal court, the ''Audiencia Nacional'', and was the examining magistrate of the ''Juzgado Central de Instrucción No. 5'', ...
declared the competence of the Spanish jurisdiction in the Spanish-Sahrawi disappearances between 1976 and 1987 in Western Sahara (mostly controlled by Morocco). There have been charges brought against some Moroccan military heads, some of them currently in power , such as the head of Morocco's armed forces, General
Housni Benslimane, charged for the detention and disappearance campaign of
Smara
Smara ( ar, السمارة ''as-Samāra'', also romanized ''Semara''; es, Esmara) is a city in the Moroccan-controlled part of Western Sahara, with a population of 57,035 recorded in the 2014 Moroccan census. It is served by Smara Airport and Sm ...
in 1976. Garzón's successor, Judge Fernando Pablo Ruz, reopened the case in November 2010.
North Korea
In North Korea, forced disappearances of nationals are characterized by detention without contact or explanation to the families of the detained. Foreign citizens, many of whom are ethnic Koreans who were living in South Korea and Japan, have been disappeared after willfully travelling to North Korea or after being abducted abroad.
Northern Ireland and Ireland
"The Disappeared" is the name given to eighteen specific individuals abducted and killed by the
Provisional IRA
The Irish Republican Army (IRA; ), also known as the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and informally as the Provos, was an Irish republicanism, Irish republican paramilitary organisation that sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland, fa ...
, the
Irish National Liberation Army, and other
Irish Republican organizations during
the Troubles
The Troubles ( ga, Na Trioblóidí) were an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998. Also known internationally as the Northern Ireland conflict, it is sometimes described as an " ...
.
In 1999, the
IRA
Ira or IRA may refer to:
*Ira (name), a Hebrew, Sanskrit, Russian or Finnish language personal name
*Ira (surname), a rare Estonian and some other language family name
*Iran, UNDP code IRA
Law
*Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, US, on status of ...
admitted to killing nine of the disappeared and gave information on the location of these bodies, but only three bodies were recovered on that occasion, one of which had already been exhumed and placed in a coffin. The best-known case was that of
Jean McConville, a Belfast mother of 10, widowed a few months before she disappeared, who the IRA claimed was an informer.
[Maillot (2005), p. 165.] The search for her remains was abandoned in 1999, but her body was discovered in 2003, a mile from where the IRA had indicated, by a family out on a walk.
Since then seven more victims have been found—one in 2008, three in 2010, one in 2014, two in 2015 and one in 2017. , three have yet to be located.
The
Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains
The Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains (ICLVR) was established by treaty between the Her Majesty's Government, United Kingdom Government and the Government of Ireland, made on 27 April 1999 in connection with the affairs o ...
, established in 1999, is the body responsible for locating the disappeared.
Pakistan
In Pakistan, forced disappearances allegedly began after the
US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. According to
Amina Masood Janjua, a human rights activist and chairperson o
Defence of Human Rights Pakistan a not for profit organization working against enforced disappearance there are more than 5000 reported cases of enforced disappearance in Pakistan. There are no formal allegations or charges against the persons thus forcefully disappeared. The systematic practice of enforced disappearance in Pakistan originated in the era of military dictator General
Pervez Musharraf
General Pervez Musharraf ( ur, , Parvez Muśharraf; born 11 August 1943) is a former Pakistani politician and four-star general of the Pakistan Army who became the tenth president of Pakistan after the successful military takeover of t ...
.
In Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, Azad Kashmir, numerous disappearances are also reportedly being committed, notably by the state intelligence agencies, which arrest and disappear some persons who refuse to join the "Jihad" against Indian-held Kashmir. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has also held state-led disappearances in its report.
Palestinian territories
In August 2015, four members of
Hamas
Hamas (, ; , ; an acronym of , "Islamic Resistance Movement") is a Palestinian Sunni-Islamic fundamentalist, militant, and nationalist organization. It has a social service wing, Dawah, and a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam ...
Armed wing were abducted in
Sinai,
Egypt
Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Medit ...
. They were abducted by unidentified gunmen according to the Egyptian security officials. The abducted men were in a bus carrying fifty of the Palestinians from
Rafah
Rafah ( ar, رفح, Rafaḥ) is a Palestinian city in the southern Gaza Strip. It is the district capital of the Rafah Governorate, located south of Gaza City. Rafah's population of 152,950 (2014) is overwhelmingly made up of former Palestini ...
, to
Cairo airport
Cairo International Airport (; ''Maṭār El Qāhira El Dawly'') is the principal international airport of Cairo and the largest and busiest airport in Egypt. It serves as the primary hub for Egyptair and Nile Air as well as several other a ...
.
Hamas
Hamas (, ; , ; an acronym of , "Islamic Resistance Movement") is a Palestinian Sunni-Islamic fundamentalist, militant, and nationalist organization. It has a social service wing, Dawah, and a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam ...
confirmed that the four abducted
Palestinians were heading to
Cairo
Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the Capital city, capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, List of ...
. The spokesman of the
interior ministry Iyad al Bazom said "We urge the Egyptian interior ministry to secure the lives of the kidnapped passengers and free them". Until the moment, no group claimed responsibility for the kidnappings.
Philippines
Estimates vary for the number of victims of enforced disappearances in the Philippines. The William S. Richardson School of Law Library at the University of Hawaii places the number of the victims of enforced disappearances under the rule of Ferdinand Marcos at 783. During the Marcos dictatorship, many people who went missing were allegedly tortured, abducted, and killed by policemen.
Activist Charlie del Rosario was a professor at the
Polytechnic University of the Philippines who was last seen on the night of 19 March 1971 while putting up posters for the national congress of the Movement for a Democratic Philippines (MDP), inside the PCC Lepanto compound.
The family suspected the Philippine government military in his abduction.
Del Rosario, who was never seen nor heard from since, is considered the first victim of enforced disappearance during the Marcos regime.
The Southern Tagalog 10 was a group of activists working in Central Luzon during Marcos' martial law in the Philippines. These 10 university students and professors were abducted and made to disappear during martial law.
Three of them were later killed and "surfaced" by suspected agents of the state. The rest remain missing to this day.
Romania
During the
communist regime
A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a one-party state that is administered and governed by a communist party guided by Marxism–Leninism. Marxism–Leninism was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, the Cominte ...
of
Nicolae Ceaușescu
Nicolae Ceaușescu ( , ; – 25 December 1989) was a Romanian communist politician and dictator. He was the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party from 1965 to 1989, and the second and last Communist leader of Romania. He ...
, it is claimed that forced disappearances occurred. For example, during the strikes of 1977 and 1987 in
Romania
Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, and ...
, leading persons involved in the strikes are alleged to have been "disappeared".
Russia
Russian rights groups estimate there have been about 5,000 forced disappearances in
Chechnya since 1999. Most of them are believed to be buried in several dozen mass graves.
The
Russian government failed to pursue any accountability process for
human rights abuses committed during the course of the conflict in Chechnya. Unable to secure justice domestically, hundreds of victims of abuse have filed applications with the
European Court of Human Rights
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR or ECtHR), also known as the Strasbourg Court, is an international court of the Council of Europe which interprets the European Convention on Human Rights. The court hears applications alleging that ...
(ECHR). In March 2005 the court issued the first rulings on Chechnya, finding the Russian government guilty of violating the right to life and the prohibition of torture with respect to civilians who had died or been forcibly disappeared at the hands of Russia's federal troops.
Since the
annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation Amnesty International has documented several enforced disappearances of ethnic
Crimean Tatars
, flag = Flag of the Crimean Tatar people.svg
, flag_caption = Flag of Crimean Tatars
, image = Love, Peace, Traditions.jpg
, caption = Crimean Tatars in traditional clothing in front of the Khan's Palace ...
, none of which has been effectively investigated. On 24 May 2014 Ervin Ibragimov, a former member of the
Bakhchysarai Town Council and a member of the World Congress of Crimean Tatars went missing. CCTV footage from a camera at a nearby shop captured a group of men stopping Ibragimov, speaking with him briefly before forcing him into their van According to the
Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group
The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group (KhPG) is one of the oldest and most active Ukrainian human rights organizations. As a legal entity, it was established in 1992, but it has been working as a human rights protection group in the Ukrainia ...
Russian authorities refuse to investigate the disappearance of Ibragimov.
South Korea
![Prisoners on ground before execution,Taejon, South Korea](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Prisoners_on_ground_before_execution%2CTaejon%2C_South_Korea.jpg)
Forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings were openly used by
South Korea
South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula and sharing a land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed by the Yellow Sea, while its eas ...
during the
Jeju Island uprising, during the
Korea War and as part of the
Bodo league re-education during the Korean war. A
taboo
A taboo or tabu is a social group's ban, prohibition, or avoidance of something (usually an utterance or behavior) based on the group's sense that it is excessively repulsive, sacred, or allowed only for certain persons.''Encyclopædia Britannica ...
to speak about these incidents lasted till the end of authoritarian rule in South Korea in 1993.
During the persecution of so-called leftist sympathizers during the war, ordinary civilians under suspicion were rounded up and grouped into four groups A, B, C and D. Groups C and D were shot immediately and buried in unmarked mass graves. A and B were drafted and/or sent on to
death marches or held in Bodo League re-education facilities.
Survivors and family members of extrajudicially killed and disappeared or re-educated persons could face death and forced disappearance if they talked about these incidences during the period of authoritarian rule.
Many, if not all of the forced disappearances and accidentally discovered mass graves during authoritarian rule were wrongfully blamed on
North Korea
North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu (Amnok) and T ...
ns or the
People's Liberation Army of China. South Korea is currently involved in shedding light on some of these incidences using the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission
A truth commission, also known as a truth and reconciliation commission or truth and justice commission, is an official body tasked with discovering and revealing past wrongdoing by a government (or, depending on the circumstances, non-state act ...
. Some of the forced disappearance victims include high-profile politicians such as late South Korean
President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Kim Dae-jung
Kim Dae-jung (; ; 6 January 192418 August 2009), was a South Korean politician and activist who served as the eighth president of South Korea from 1998 to 2003.
He was a 2000 Nobel Peace Prize recipient for his work for democracy and human ...
who was forcefully disappeared from his Tokyo hotel room. His
attempted murder by throwing him with weights on his legs overboard into the open sea was stopped short by Japanese navy vessel warning fire.
Spain
![Spanish Civil War - Mass grave - Estépar, Burgos](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Spanish_Civil_War_-_Mass_grave_-_Est%C3%A9par%2C_Burgos.jpg)
The United Nations working group for Human Rights reported in 2013 that on the period between the
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War ( es, Guerra Civil Española)) or The Revolution ( es, La Revolución, link=no) among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War ( es, Cuarta Guerra Carlista, link=no) among Carlists, and The Rebellion ( es, La Rebelión, link ...
(1936–1939) and the end of
Franco
Franco may refer to:
Name
* Franco (name)
* Francisco Franco (1892–1975), Spanish general and dictator of Spain from 1939 to 1975
* Franco Luambo (1938–1989), Congolese musician, the "Grand Maître"
Prefix
* Franco, a prefix used when ref ...
's dictatorship (1939–1975), an estimated 114,226 people "disappeared" by being forcibly taken away by either official or unofficial armed groups, following which they were secretly murdered and later buried in undisclosed locations. The report also mentions the systematic kidnapping and "stealing" of children and newborns, in numbers reaching 30,960 children, which continued even after the end of the dictatorship during the 1970s and 1980s.
The disappearances include whole Republican military units, such as the
221st Mixed Brigade. The families of the deceased soldiers speculate that the bodies of the disappeared members of this unit may have ended up in unknown mass graves.
It was not until 2008 that the first attempt was made to take the issue to court, with that attempt failing and with the judge in charge of the process,
Baltasar Garzón
Baltasar Garzón Real (; born 26 October 1955) is a former Spanish judge. Garzón formerly served on Spain's central criminal court, the ''Audiencia Nacional'', and was the examining magistrate of the ''Juzgado Central de Instrucción No. 5'', ...
, being himself impeached and subsequently disqualified. The UN's Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances has openly stated that the Spanish Government is failing to its duties in these matters. the Spanish authorities keep actively hampering the investigation into forced disappearances that took place during and after the civil war.
Estimate of the ''Desaparecidos del franquismo''
Identification and systematic analysis of the bones of victims in mass graves have not yet, to date, been undertaken by any government of the current Spanish democracy (since 1977).
According to ''
La Nueva España
''La Nueva España'' is a daily newspaper in Spain. Published in Oviedo, it serves Asturias
Asturias (, ; ast, Asturies ), officially the Principality of Asturias ( es, Principado de Asturias; ast, Principáu d'Asturies; Galician-Asturia ...
'' newspaper, the data of people buried in mass graves brought before the ''Audiencia Nacional'' court on 16 October 2008 are the following:
*Andalusia 32,289 (Almería 373, Cádiz 1,665, Córdoba 7,091, Granada 5,048, Huelva 3,805, Jaén 3,253, Málaga 7,797, Sevilla 3,257)
*Aragón 10,178 (Huesca 2,061, Teruel 1,338, Zaragoza 6,779)
*Asturias 1,246 (Gijón 1,246)
*Balearic Islands 1,777 (Mallorca 1,486, Menorca 106, Eivissa and Formentera 185)
*Canary Islands 262 (Gran Canaria 200, Tenerife 62)
*Cantabria 850
*Castilla-La Mancha 7,067 (Albacete 1,026, Ciudad Real 1,694, Cuenca 377, Toledo 3,970)
*Castilla-León 12,979 (Ávila 650, Burgos 4,800, León 1,250, Palencia 1,180, Salamanca 650 Segovia 370, Soria 287, Valladolid 2,555, Zamora 1,237)
*Catalonia 2,400
*Valencian Community 4,345 (Aicante 742, Castellón 1,303, Valencia 2,300)
*Basque Country 9,459 (Álava 100, Guipúzcoa 340, Vizcaya 369, Basque Government data 8,650)
*Extremadura 10,266
*Galicia 4,396
*La Rioja 2,007
*Madrid 2,995
*Murcia 855
*Navarra 3,431
*Ceuta, Melilla and North African territories 464
*Other territories 7,000
*Total 114,266 (the final total number was corrected and expanded in the course of the trials reaching a total of 143,353)
Sri Lanka
According to a United Nations 1999 study,
Sri Lanka is the country that has the second-highest number of disappeared people in the world (second to Iraq). Since 1980, 12,000 Sri Lankans have gone missing after being detained by security forces. More than 55,000 people have been killed in the past 27 years. The figures are still lower than the then-current Sri Lankan government's 2009 estimate of 17,000 people missing, which was made after it came to power with a commitment to correct the human rights issues.
In 2003, the
International Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC; french: Comité international de la Croix-Rouge) is a humanitarian organization which is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and it is also a three-time Nobel Prize Laureate. State parties (signato ...
(ICRC) restarted investigations into the disappearance of 11,000 people during Sri Lanka's civil war.
On 29 May 2009, the British newspaper ''
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper '' The Sunday Times'' (f ...
'' acquired confidential U.N. documents that record nearly 7,000 civilian deaths in the no-fire zone up to the end of April. The toll then surged, the paper quoted unidentified U.N. sources as saying, with an average of 1,000 civilians killed each day until 19 May, when the government declared victory over the
Tamil Tiger
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE; ta, தமிழீழ விடுதலைப் புலிகள், translit=Tamiḻīḻa viṭutalaip pulikaḷ, si, දෙමළ ඊළාම් විමුක්ති කොටි, t ...
rebels. That means the final death toll is more than 20,000, ''The Times'' said. "Higher", a U.N. source told the paper. "Keep going." The United Nations has previously said 7,000 civilians were killed in fighting between January and May. A top Sri Lankan official called the 20,000 figure unfounded. Gordon Weiss, a U.N. spokesman in Sri Lanka, told
CNN
CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...
that a large number of civilians were killed, though he did not confirm the 20,000 figure.
Former US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton ( Rodham; born October 26, 1947) is an American politician, diplomat, and former lawyer who served as the 67th United States Secretary of State for President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013, as a United States sen ...
has accused Sri Lanka of "causing untold suffering".
Syria
Cases of forced disappearance in Syria started when late Syrian president
Hafez al-Assad started to face opposition from citizens in the late 1970s. While he was able to buy elite merchants of
Damascus through Badr el-Deen Shallah, the general public was outraged by Assad's policies in ruling the country and the rise of corruption. From then on, any voice opposing or questioning the Syrian government was silenced by forced disappearance or threats. According to Human Rights Watch, no fewer than 17,000 people disappeared during Assad's 30-year rule.
Bashar al-Assad took his father's policy further and considered any voice questioning anything about Syria's political, economical, social, or otherwise policies should be monitored and when needed, detained and accused of weakening national empathy. A recent case is
Tal Mallohi, a 19-year-old blogger summoned for interrogation on 27 December 2009 who was released over 4 years later.
In November 2015,
Amnesty International released a report accusing the
Syrian government and its allied militants of kidnapping tens of thousands of people since 2011. The international organization said that such acts represent a crime against humanity. The organization called Syrian government to allow the entry of the
UN's international committee of inquiry observers in order to access information related to the detainees.
Amnesty International has claimed that more than 65,000 people, mostly
civilians
Civilians under international humanitarian law are "persons who are not members of the armed forces" and they are not " combatants if they carry arms openly and respect the laws and customs of war". It is slightly different from a non-combatant ...
, have been forcibly disappeared between March 2011 and August 2015.
The Syrian government, on the other hand, has repeatedly denied reports accusing it of committing crimes against humanity.
Thailand
In 2013, the ''
Bangkok Post'' reported that Police General Vasit Dejkunjorn, founder of the Thai Spring movement, told a seminar that forced disappearance is a tool which corrupt state power uses to eliminate individuals deemed a threat.
According to
Amnesty Thailand, at least 59 human-rights defenders have been victims of forced disappearance between 1998 and 2018.
Attorney
Somchai Neelapaijit
Somchai Neelapaijit (Thai - สมชาย นีละไพจิตร; 13 May 1951 – last seen on 12 March 2004), a Thai Muslim lawyer and human rights activist who "disappeared" 12 March 2004 during Thaksin Shinawatra's regime. On that ...
, Karen-ethnic activist
Pholachi "Billy" Rakchongcharoen, and villager-turned-activist, Den Khamlae are among those who disappeared.
[
Haji Sulong, a reformist and a separatist disappeared in 1954. He sought for greater recognition of the '' Jawi'' community in ]Patani
Patani Darussalam ( Bahasa Malayu Arabic : , also sometimes Patani Raya or Patani Besar, "Greater Patani"; th, ปาตานี) is a historical region in the Malay peninsula. It includes the southern Thai provinces of Pattani, Yala (Jal ...
, and Tanong Po-arn, Thai labour union leader who disappeared following the 1991 Thai coup d'état by National Peace Keeping Council against the elected government.
On 12 March 2004, Somchai Neelapaijit
Somchai Neelapaijit (Thai - สมชาย นีละไพจิตร; 13 May 1951 – last seen on 12 March 2004), a Thai Muslim lawyer and human rights activist who "disappeared" 12 March 2004 during Thaksin Shinawatra's regime. On that ...
, a well-known Thai Muslim activist lawyer in the kingdom's southern region, was kidnapped by Thai police and has since disappeared. Officially listed as a disappeared person, his presumed widow, Mrs Ankhana Neelapaichit, has been seeking justice for her husband since Somchai went missing. On 11 March 2009, Mrs Neelapaichit was part of a special panel at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Thailand to commemorate her husband's disappearance and to keep attention focused on the case and on human rights abuses in Thailand
Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is b ...
.
According to the legal assistance group Thai Lawyers for Human Rights, at least 86 Thais left Thailand seeking asylum abroad following the military takeover in May 2014. Among them are the four members of the Thai band Fai Yen, some of whose songs mock the monarchy, a serious offense in Thailand. The band, whose name means 'cool fire', announced on social media that its members feared for their lives after "many trusted people told us that the Thai military will come to kill us." All of those who disappeared in late-2018 and early-2019 were accused by Thai authorities of anti-monarchical activity.
Two Thai activists went missing while living in exile in Vientiane: Itthipol Sukpaen vanished in June 2016. Wuthipong "Ko Tee" Kochathamakun disappeared from his residence in July 2017. Eyewitnesses said Wuthipong was abducted by a group of Thai-speaking men dressed in black.
In December 2018, Surachai Danwattananusorn, a Thai political exile, and two aides went missing from their home in Vientiane, Laos. The two aides were later found murdered. Some in the Thai media see the forced disappearances and murders as a warning to anti-monarchists. , Surachai remains missing. The number of "disappeared" Thai activists exiled in Laos may be as high as five since 2015.
Siam Theerawut, Chucheep Chivasut, and Kritsana Thapthai, three Thai anti-monarchy activists, went missing on 8 May 2019, when they are thought to have been extradited to Thailand from Vietnam after they attempted to enter the country with counterfeit Indonesian passports. The trio are wanted in Thailand for insulting the monarchy and failing to report when summoned by the junta after the 2014 Thai coup d'état. Their disappearance passed the one year mark on 8 May 2020 with still no sign of the trio.
Thai pro-democracy activist Wanchalearn Satsaksit was abducted from Phnom Penh on 4 June 2020, which prompted public concern and became one factor behind the 2020 Thai protests.
Turkey
Turkish human rights groups accuse the Turkish security forces of being responsible for the disappearance of more than 1,500 civilians of the Kurdish
Kurdish may refer to:
*Kurds or Kurdish people
*Kurdish languages
*Kurdish alphabets
*Kurdistan, the land of the Kurdish people which includes:
**Southern Kurdistan
**Eastern Kurdistan
**Northern Kurdistan
**Western Kurdistan
See also
* Kurd (dis ...
minority in the 1980s and 1990s, in attempts to root out the PKK
The Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK is a Kurdish militant political organization and armed guerrilla movement, which historically operated throughout Kurdistan, but is now primarily based in the mountainous Kurdish-majority regions of sout ...
. Every week on Saturdays since 1995, Saturday Mothers
The Saturday Mothers ( tr, Cumartesi Anneleri) is a group which gathers every Saturday at noon for half an hour at Galatasaray, Istanbul, Turkey, initially to ask for clarification about their missing relatives.Gülsüm Baydar and Berfin İvegen ...
hold silent vigil/sit-in protests to demand that their lost ones to be found and those responsible be brought to justice. Each year Yakay-Der, the Turkish Human Rights Association (İHD) and the International Committee Against Disappearances (ICAD), organise a series of events in Turkey to mark the "Week of Disappeared People".
In April 2009, state prosecutors in Turkey ordered the excavation of several sites around Turkey believed to hold Kurdish victims of state death squads from the 1980s and 1990s, in response to calls for Turkey's security establishment to come clean about past abuses.
In a study published in June 2017 by Sweden-based Stockholm Center for Freedom, 12 individual cases of enforced disappearances in Turkey since 2016 were documented under the emergency rule. The research titled as "Enforced Disappearances in Turkey" claimed that all cases were connected to clandestine elements within Turkish security forces. Turkish authorities were reluctant to investigate the cases despite pleas from family members.
Ukraine
During the Russo-Ukrainian War
The Russo-Ukrainian War; uk, російсько-українська війна, rosiisko-ukrainska viina. has been ongoing between Russia (alongside Russian separatists in Ukraine) and Ukraine since February 2014. Following Ukraine's Rev ...
there had been many cases of forced disappearances on the territory of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic (DPR or DNR). The DPR leader Alexander Zakharchenko
Alexander Vladimirovich Zakharchenko uk, Олекса́ндр Володи́мирович Заха́рченко, translit=Oleksandr Volodymyrovych Zakharchenko (26 June 1976 – 31 August 2018) was a Ukrainian separatist leader who was the he ...
said that his forces detained up to five "Ukrainian subversives" each day. It was estimated that about 632 people were under illegal detention by separatist forces on 11 December 2014.
On 2 June 2017 freelance journalist Stanislav Aseyev was abducted. Firstly the de facto DNR government denied knowing his whereabouts but on 16 July, an agent of the DNR's "Ministry of State Security" confirmed that Aseyev was in their custody and that he is suspected of "espionage". Independent media is not allowed to report from the "DNR"-controlled territory.
United States
According to Amnesty International (AI), the United States has engaged in forced disappearance of prisoners of war, all captured overseas and never taken to the US, in the course of its War on Terror
The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is an ongoing international counterterrorism military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks. The main targets of the campaign are militant ...
. AI lists at "least 39 detainees, all of whom are still missing, who are believed to have been held in secret sites run by the United States government overseas."
The United States Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national sec ...
kept the identity of the individuals it held in the US Guantanamo Bay Naval Base
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base ( es, Base Naval de la Bahía de Guantánamo), officially known as Naval Station Guantanamo Bay or NSGB, (also called GTMO, pronounced Gitmo as jargon by members of the U.S. military) is a United States military bas ...
("Gitmo") in Cuba secret, from its opening on 11 January 2002 to 20 April 2006. An official list of the 558 individuals then held in the camp was published on 20 April 2006 in response to a court order from United States District Judge
The United States district courts are the trial courts of the U.S. federal judiciary. There is one district court for each federal judicial district, which each cover one U.S. state or, in some cases, a portion of a state. Each district cou ...
Jed Rakoff. Another list, stated to be of all 759 individuals who had been held in Guantanamo, was published on 20 May 2006.[
]
Venezuela
A report produced by Foro Penal
Foro Penal () is a Venezuelan human rights organization that provides legal assistance ''pro bono'' to people subject of arbitrary detentions and their relatives. The organization is composed of regional coordinators for each state in Venezuela, ...
and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights documents that 200 cases of forced disappearances in 2018 increased to 524 in 2019, attributed to increased protests. The analysis found that the average disappearance lasted just over five days, suggesting the government sought to avoid the scrutiny that might accompany large-scale and long-term detentions.
Former Yugoslavia
Thousands of people were subject to forced disappearance during the Yugoslav Wars
The Yugoslav Wars were a series of separate but related Naimark (2003), p. xvii. ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies that took place in the SFR Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2001. The conflicts both led up to and resulted from ...
.
Enforced disappearances within migration
The increasingly perilous journeys of migrants and refugees and the ever more rigid migration policies of States cause a particular risk for migrants to become victims of enforced disappearances. This has been recognized by the UN's Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Also the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances recognized the increased risk of enforced disappearances as a result of migration in the Guiding Principles for the Search of Disappeared Persons.[Guiding principles for the search for disappeared persons, CED/C/7, 8 May 2019]
See also
* Lists of people who disappeared
Lists of people who disappeared include those whose current whereabouts are unknown, or whose deaths are unsubstantiated. Many people who disappear are eventually declared dead ''in absentia''. Some of these people were possibly subjected to enfo ...
* Arbitrary arrest and detention
Arbitrary arrest and arbitrary detention are the arrest or detention of an individual in a case in which there is no likelihood or evidence that they committed a crime against legal statute, or in which there has been no proper due process of l ...
* Argentine Dirty War
The Dirty War ( es, Guerra sucia) is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina ( es, dictadura cívico-militar de Argentina, links=no) for the period of state terrorism in Argentina from 1974 to 1983 as ...
* Black jails
Black jails () are a network of extralegal detention centers established by Chinese security forces and private security companies across the People's Republic of China. They are used mainly to detain, without trial, petitioners (上访者, '' ...
(China)
* Black site
In military terminology, a black site is a location at which an unacknowledged black operation or black project is conducted. According to the Associated Press, "Black sites are clandestine jails where prisoners generally are not charged with ...
s
* Causeway Bay Books disappearances
The Causeway Bay Books disappearances are a series of international disappearances concerning five staff members of Causeway Bay Books, a former bookstore located in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. Between October and December 2015, five staff of ...
* Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas
* Command responsibility
Command responsibility (superior responsibility, the Yamashita standard, and the Medina standard) is the legal doctrine of hierarchical accountability for war crimes.
* ''Damnatio memoriae
is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. Depending on the extent, it can be a case of historical negationism. There are and have been many routes to , includi ...
''
* Extraordinary rendition
Extraordinary rendition is a euphemism for state-sponsored forcible abduction in another jurisdiction and transfer to a third state. The phrase usually refers to a United States-led program used during the War on Terror, which had the purpos ...
* Ghost detainee
* '' Gukurahundi''
* Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance Persons
*
* International Day of the Disappeared
The International Day of the Disappeared, on August 30 of each year, is a day created to draw attention to the fate of individuals imprisoned at places and under poor conditions unknown to their relatives and/or legal representatives. The impulse f ...
* Missing person
* Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is an Argentine human rights association formed in response to the National Reorganization Process, the military dictatorship by Jorge Rafael Videla, with the goal of finding the '' desaparecidos'', initially, a ...
, an Argentine activist group formed by mothers of ''desaparecidos''
* ''Nacht und Nebel
''Nacht und Nebel'' (German: ), meaning Night and Fog, was a directive issued by Adolf Hitler on 7 December 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany during World War II, who were to ...
''
* National Defense Authorization Act
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the name for each of a series of United States federal laws specifying the annual budget and expenditures of the U.S. Department of Defense. The first NDAA was passed in 1961. The U.S. Congress o ...
* Non-person
* North Korean abductions of Japanese
Abductions of Japanese citizens from Japan by agents of the North Korean government took place during a period of six years from 1977 to 1983. Although only 17 Japanese (eight men and nine women) are officially recognized by the Japanese governm ...
* Salt Pit
The Salt Pit and Cobalt are the code names of an isolated clandestine CIA black site prison and interrogation center outside Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. It is located north of Kabul and was the location of a brick factory prior to the Afgh ...
* Saturday Mothers
The Saturday Mothers ( tr, Cumartesi Anneleri) is a group which gathers every Saturday at noon for half an hour at Galatasaray, Istanbul, Turkey, initially to ask for clarification about their missing relatives.Gülsüm Baydar and Berfin İvegen ...
, a Turkish activist group similar to Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is an Argentine human rights association formed in response to the National Reorganization Process, the military dictatorship by Jorge Rafael Videla, with the goal of finding the '' desaparecidos'', initially, a ...
* Secret police
Secret police (or political police) are intelligence, security or police agencies that engage in covert operations against a government's political, religious, or social opponents and dissidents. Secret police organizations are characteristic of ...
* Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location
* Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action
The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (VDPA) is a human rights declaration adopted by consensus at the World Conference on Human Rights on 25 June 1993 in Vienna, Austria. The position of United Nations High Commissioner for Human ...
References
External links
International Center for Transitional Justice, Gender Justice page
Amnesty International: Day of the Disappeared
International Committee Against Disappearances
Familylinks.icrc.org
—Website for people looking for family members missing due to a conflict or natural disaster. International Committee of the Red Cross.
* Human Rights First
Behind the Wire: An Update to Ending Secret Detentions (2005)
Nieto Recuperado'—Born to Parents Disappeared by Argentina's Dictatorship, Kidnapped and Raised by a Military Family, a 'Recovered Grandchild' Finds His Way Home"
– video report by ''Democracy Now!''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Enforced Disappearance
Enforced disappearance,
Imprisonment and detention
Counterterrorism
Political crimes
Human rights abuses
Kidnapping
Political repression
Crimes against humanity
War crimes by type
Euphemisms
Extrajudicial killings by type