Conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere, together with a global slide from democratic to authoritarian rule, have produced a spike in the number of missing and disappeared persons. This is a trend that has been compounded by some of the consequences of climate change, including mass migration.
As we mark the International Day of the Disappeared on Friday (30 August), it is important to highlight the fact that accounting for the missing is an essential component of efforts to protect and restore the system of international law that protects all of us.
Governments have mandatory obligations to investigate disappearances. It doesn’t matter if the missing person is a paid-up traveler with a ticket and a visa or an irregular migrant with neither; it doesn’t matter if the person is a citizen of the country where they have disappeared; it doesn’t matter what religion or colour or gender they may be. The right to truth and justice is universal.
The good news is that this basic principle can be upheld in practice.
There are tried-and-tested strategies through which very large numbers of missing persons can be accounted for. Effective measures can be taken to document cases, to locate and identify victims, to return living victims, including children, to their families and to return the remains of deceased victims to their loved ones so that they can be buried with dignity.
Data collection and management systems have been developed that cross borders if necessary, bringing relevant agencies together to apply the latest genetic science.
The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) pioneered a multidisciplinary approach in the former Yugoslavia, where it has helped the authorities to account for more than three quarters of the 40,000 people who went missing in the conflicts of the 1990s.
This approach supported the process of post-war justice that has been a lynchpin of conflict resolution in the Western Balkans and elsewhere. Evidence gathered by ICMP and its partners during the exhumation of mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina was presented as evidence at the trials of individuals subsequently convicted of war crimes.
In the case of Ukraine, the connection between accounting for the missing and restoring the rule of law has been recognised.
The European Union and the governments of Canada, Germany, Norway, the United States, and the Netherlands, are supporting ICMP’s programme to help the Ukrainian authorities develop a systematic DNA-led process to locate and identify those who have gone missing as a result of the Russian invasion – and a central plank of this effort is to ensure that evidence will be documented in such a way that it can be presented in court.
In June this year, ICMP gathered Ukrainian and international officials, technical experts and civil society representatives at its headquarters in The Hague to examine steps that can be taken to repatriate children who were forcibly taken from Ukraine and put up for adoption by Russian families.
This is a war crime for which Russian president Vladimir Putin and the Russian commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova have already been indicted by the International Criminal Court.
It will require a concerted legal effort on the part of the Ukrainian authorities and the international mechanisms designed to maintain the rule of law to ensure that the rights of these children and their families are restored, and the perpetrators are brought to justice. It will also require the application of advanced DNA technology and a program of psychosocial support.
As we mark the International Day of the Disappeared it is important to remember that the issue of missing persons — from conflict, from natural disasters, from migration and other causes — affects all of us, and that practical steps can and should be taken, even amid the chaos and danger of conflict, to gather evidence that will establish the fate of the missing and bring those responsible for their disappearance to justice.
Accounting for the missing and gathering evidence for future war crimes trials are an essential element in restoring the rule of law and laying the foundations for long-term peace.
Kathryne Bomberger is the director-general of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), a treaty-based intergovernmental organisation with headquarters in The Hague. Its mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and other authorities in locating persons missing as a result of conflicts, human rights abuses, disasters, organised violence and other causes and to assist them in doing so.
Kathryne Bomberger is the director-general of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), a treaty-based intergovernmental organisation with headquarters in The Hague. Its mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and other authorities in locating persons missing as a result of conflicts, human rights abuses, disasters, organised violence and other causes and to assist them in doing so.