Enforced disappearance is one of the cruellest practices in the vast (far too vast) range of human rights violations. Yet it receives little political attention, and not enough is being done to prevent it or to deliver truth, justice and reparation to its victims.
Opportunities to convey the scale and impact of enforced disappearances are few. So are chances to put the issue on the international agenda, to recognise the immense value of the handful of mechanisms that exist to combat it, and to amplify the voices of the families who search, with courage and persistence, for their loved ones.
That is precisely why the event held on 24 September at the United Nations in Geneva to mark the 20th anniversary of the Convention on Enforced Disappearance was so welcome. Anniversaries are an excellent way to rekindle interest in causes that rarely make the headlines. They are also a good time to take stock.
The adoption of the Convention in December 2006 was a major milestone. It was the result of remarkable collaboration between victims’ groups, human rights organisations, lawyers and diplomats. The effort had been a long time coming (the need for such a treaty was already clear in the early 1980s), and it finally came to fruition at a particularly difficult moment for human rights: in the aftermath of 9/11, at the height of the “war on terror”. The dozens of people who made it happen deserve enormous credit, because they did so in the face of opposition from powerful actors.
Twenty years on, at a time openly hostile to international law and human rights, looking back on achievements like this one is both heartening and deeply inspiring. I strongly recommend watching the anniversary video, which shows how the negotiations unfolded and how every legal and political obstacle was overcome, one by one. There are valuable lessons to be learned.
Even so, the Convention’s 20-year record is modest at best. There is no doubt that things would be worse without the Convention and the Committee set up to oversee it, which does admirable work with very limited resources. But a look at the global picture makes clear that the Convention has neither put an end to enforced disappearances nor secured the rights of victims. It is also worth noting that only 78 states have ratified it, making it the second least-ratified human rights convention after the one on migrant workers.
As Juan Pablo Albán, Chair of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances, put it: “There is more left to do than has been achieved. The Convention changed international law, but there is still a huge gap between the law on paper and what victims actually experience. That must be at the heart of any assessment.”
No assessment is complete without also looking ahead. With enforced disappearances, people often make the serious mistake of treating them purely as a thing of the past, to be addressed through memory policies. Remembrance and recognition are certainly necessary, but they are clearly not enough. Enforced disappearances are not a historical phenomenon. Until every case is resolved, they remain a pressing, present-day issue.
First, because the impact of a disappearance on a family or community is so devastating that it does not fade with time. You only need to talk to mothers who have spent their entire lives searching for their children to understand that this is an acute pain they live with every single day. In addition, the consequences and trauma are often passed down from one generation to the next.
Second, because the right to truth prevails, even decades after a person has disappeared. The passage of time does not release states from their obligation to investigate disappearances thoroughly. This is something both the Committee and the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances have repeatedly reminded Spain. Closer to home, in Catalonia, very few mass graves from the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship have been opened, and only a tiny number of bodies have been identified and returned to their families.
Third, because, contrary to popular belief, enforced disappearances are not just something that happened under last century’s dictatorships. In fact, since the Convention was adopted, new challenges have emerged and the contexts in which disappearances occur have become more varied.
Right now, all over the world, people are still being forcibly disappeared. It happens in major armed conflicts such as those in Sudan and Ukraine, among many others, but also amid large-scale organised crime, as in Mexico; under authoritarian regimes such as Nicaragua and Eritrea; in the name of “security” policies, as in El Salvador; along migration routes; and elsewhere.
In such a volatile global context, with so little appetite for protecting human rights, institutional efforts to find the disappeared could shrink even further, while the situations in which disappearances occur could multiply. The struggle that searching families began decades ago is as relevant as ever, for them and for humanity as a whole. It is time to give it the weight and support it demands.