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81-613: Most of the killings were arranged in a form of forced disappearances from multiple cities and towns upon the arrival of German forces. In the spring and summer of 1940 the Nazi authorities in German-occupied central Poland (the so-called General Government ) arrested more than 30,000 Polish citizens. About 7,000 of them, including community leaders, professors, teachers and priests (labeled as suspected of criminal activities), were subsequently massacred secretly at various locations - including at

162-628: A car bomb in Buenos Aires , Argentina , in 1974. A year later, the deaths of 119 opponents abroad were claimed as the product of infighting between Marxist factions, the DINA setting up a disinformation campaign to propagate this thesis, Operation Colombo . The campaign was legitimized and supported by the leading newspaper in Chile, El Mercurio . Other prominent victims of Operation Condor included, among thousands of less famous persons, Juan José Torres ,

243-540: 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 called the International Coalition against Enforced Disappearances is working towards universal ratification of the convention. Disappearances work on two levels: not only do they silence opponents and critics who have disappeared, but they also create uncertainty and fear in

324-484: A United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) communication base in Panama . Pinochet justified these operations as being necessary in order to save the country from communism . Some political scientists have ascribed the relative bloodiness of the coup to the stability of the existing democratic system, which required extreme action to overturn. Some of the most famous cases of human rights violations occurred during

405-531: A convention within the framework of the United Nations. This was followed by the deliberations of the 1981 Paris Colloquium submitted by Louis Joinet in the form of a draft subcommittee in August 1988. Several governments, international organizations and non-governmental organizations responded to the invitation of Secretary-General Kofi Annan to provide comments and observations to the project. On 20 December 2006,

486-417: 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 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 and ultimate fate of the disappeared person. The convention contains several provisions concerning

567-646: 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

648-595: A plan to eliminate Poland's intelligentsia and leadership in the western part of the country, realized by Einsatzgruppen and Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz . As the result of this operation 60,000 Polish nobles , teachers, entrepreneurs, social workers, priests, judges and political activists were killed in 10 regional actions. The Intelligenzaktion was continued by the German AB-Aktion Operation in occupied territories of central Poland. Both murder operations were conducted in part according to an "enemies of

729-672: 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". Since 2010, under

810-570: A specific jurisprudence on enforced disappearance. 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

891-474: A victim is abducted , may be illegally detained , and is often tortured during interrogation, ultimately killed, and the body disposed of secretly. The party committing the murder has plausible deniability as there is no evidence of the victim's death. Enforced disappearance was first recognized as a human rights issue in the 1970s as a result of its use by military dictatorships in Latin America during

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972-491: Is also evidence that enforced disappearances occur systematically during armed conflict, such as Nazi Germany's Night and Fog program, which constitutes 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

1053-573: 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 ) to leave no trace of their death. Without any bodies, the government could deny any knowledge of their whereabouts and accusations that they had been killed. The forced disappearances were

1134-587: The Algerian Civil War , which began in 1992 as militant Islamist guerrillas attacked the military government that had annulled an Islamic Salvation Front 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 forces under Mohamed Mediène . This latter group has become

1215-567: The Awami League regime, at least 500 people – most of whom are opposition leaders and activists – have been declared disappeared in Bangladesh by the state security forces . According to the report of a domestic human rights organization, 82 people have disappeared from January to September 2014. After the disappearances, at least 39 of the victims were found dead while others remained missing. On 25 June 2010, an opposition leader Chowdhury Alam

1296-662: The Christian Democrat President of Chile from 1964 to 1970, may have been poisoned in 1982 by a toxin produced by DINA biochemist Eugenio Berrios . Berríos himself is reputed to having been assassinated by Chilean intelligence in Uruguay , after being spirited away to said country in the early 1990s. Mieczys%C5%82aw Niedzia%C5%82kowski Mieczysław Niedziałkowski (September 19, 1893 in Vilnius - June 21, 1940 in Palmiry )

1377-736: 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

1458-565: 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

1539-638: The Gestapo and had their names registered. Frank finally accepted and approved the Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion on 16 May 1940. In the following weeks, the German police, Gestapo, SD ( Sicherheitsdienst ) and units of the Wehrmacht arrested roughly 30,000 Poles in major Polish cities, including Warsaw , Łódź , Lublin and Kraków . The interned were held in a number of prisons, including

1620-669: The Institute 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,

1701-678: The Inter-American Court of Human Rights promulgated the first convictions declaring the State of Honduras guilty of 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

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1782-641: The Ponary massacre , in German concentration camps, and in ghettos. The total number of victims and the specific dates of executions of members of the Polish intelligentsia can only be approximated due to their multitude. After the war, many Germans responsible for organizing the AB Action were tried before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals . However, the majority of responsible commanders vanished during and after

1863-615: The Second World War , the Nuremberg trials brought to public attention to the Nacht und Nebel decree, one of the most prominent antecedents of the crime of enforced disappearance. The trials included the testimony of 20 of those persons considered a threat to the security of Nazi Germany and whom the regime detained and condemned to death in the occupied territories of Europe. However, the executions were not carried out immediately; at one time,

1944-588: 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

2025-709: 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 survived assassination attempts, included Christian-Democrat politician Bernardo Leighton , who barely escaped an assassination attempt in Rome in 1975 by the Italian neo-fascist terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie (the assassination attempt seriously injured Leighton and his wife, Anita Fresno, leaving her permanently disabled); Carlos Altamirano ,

2106-711: The United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance . In international human rights law , disappearances at the hands of the state has been labelled 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

2187-581: The Chilean military's seizure of power on 11 September 1973, the military junta led by the then commander-in-chief Augusto Pinochet banned all the leftist parties that had constituted the democratically elected president Salvador Allende 's UP coalition. All other parties were placed in "indefinite recess", and later banned outright. The regime's violence was directed not only against dissidents, but also against their families and other civilians. The Rettig Report concluded 2,279 persons who disappeared during

2268-508: The Commission on Human Rights to make appropriate recommendations. On 6 March 1979, the Commission authorized the appointment as experts of Dr. Felix Ermacora and Waleed M. Sadi, who later resigned due to political pressure, to study the question of the fate of disappearances in Chile , issuing a report to the General Assembly on 21 November 1979. Felix Ermacora's report became a reference point on

2349-931: 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

2430-574: 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

2511-423: The French expert in the then Sub-commission 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

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2592-515: The German secret police or Gestapo . He was shot dead on 21 June 1940 in Palmiry during the German AB-Aktion . After his arrest by the Gestapo . Niedziałkowski was personally interviewed by Heinrich Himmler , who asked "What do you want from us; what do you expect?" Niedziałkowski responded "From you I neither want nor demand anything. With you I fight." This biographical article about

2673-509: The Palmiry forest complex near Palmiry . The others were sent to Nazi concentration camps . The mass murder of Polish leaders, politicians, artists, aristocrats, the intelligentsia , and people suspected of potential anti-Nazi activity began in the fall of 1939, and was seen by Nazi Germany as a pre-emptive measure to keep the Polish resistance scattered and to prevent the Poles from revolting during

2754-520: The Polish intelligentsia were executed at the mass murder sites in Palmiry near Warsaw, Firlej , Wincentynów near Radom , and in the Bliżyn forest near Skarżysko-Kamienna . Among those killed were Maciej Rataj , Stefan Bryła , Tadeusz Tański , Mieczysław Niedziałkowski , Janusz Kusociński and Stefan Kopec . Actions were started on a similar scale in other Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany . According to many historians , including Norman Davies ,

2835-691: The Reich list" prepared before the war by members of the German minority in Poland and printed ahead of time by the German Intelligence as the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen (Special Prosecution Book-Poland). Prior to AB-Aktion , in late 1939 and early 1940, most Polish university professors, intellectuals, writers, politicians, teachers and other members of the elite of Polish society were briefly arrested by

2916-712: 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

2997-512: The USSR . Among the most notable mass executions of Polish professors was the massacre of Lwów professors , in which approximately 45 professors of the university in Lwów were murdered together with their families and guests. Among those killed in the massacre were Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński , former Polish prime minister Kazimierz Bartel , Włodzimierz Stożek , and Stanisław Ruziewicz . Thousands more perished in

3078-685: 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

3159-410: The action against Polish leaders was coordinated with the authorities of the Soviet Union , who at the same time perpetrated the mass murder of 22,000 Polish military officers at Katyń and other places. The active persecution of Polish intellectuals was continued until the end of the war. The direct continuation of the AB Action was a German campaign in the east started after the German invasion of

3240-414: 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. Almost immediately after

3321-499: 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

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3402-440: The convention, which included 59 nations. 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

3483-525: The crimes. During Argentina 's Dirty War and Operation Condor , many alleged political dissidents were abducted or illegally detained and kept in clandestine detention centers such as Navy Petty-Officers School or "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 , contributed up to 30,000 desaparecidos, or disappeared persons, to

3564-466: The demands for the government initiatives to probe such disappearances, investigations into such cases were absent. In 1999 opposition leaders Yury Zacharanka and Viktar Hanchar , as well as his business associate Anatol Krasouski, disappeared. Hanchar and Krasouski disappeared the same day of a broadcast on state television in which President Alexander Lukashenko ordered the chiefs of his security services to crack down on "opposition scum". Although

3645-415: The dictatorship to find 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 as of 2016 . The term desaparecidos was used by de facto President General Jorge Rafael Videla , who said in

3726-433: The dirty wars. However, it has occurred all over the world. According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court , which came into force on July 1, 2002, when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed at any civilian population, enforced disappearance qualifies as a crime against humanity , not subject to a statute of limitations , in international criminal law . On December 20, 2006,

3807-444: The early period: in October 1973, at least 70 people were killed throughout the country by the Caravan of Death . Charles Horman , a journalist from the US , "disappeared", as did Víctor Olea Alegría , a member of the Socialist Party , and many others, in 1973. Mathematician Boris Weisfeiler is thought to have disappeared near Colonia Dignidad , a German colony founded by Nazi Christian minister Paul Schäfer in Parral , which

3888-465: The express definition of the crime of enforced disappearance had not yet been defined, the Court had to rely on different articles of the American Convention on Human Rights of 1969. Other rulings issued by the Inter-American Court condemned Colombia , Guatemala (for several cases including the call of the "street children"), Peru , and Bolivia . In Europe, the European Court of Human Rights , established in 1959, in accordance with article 38 of

3969-433: The fate or whereabouts of their family members who have reportedly disappeared." In August 2014, the working group reported 43,250 unresolved cases of disappearances in 88 different states. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance , adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 20, 2006, states that the widespread or systematic practice of enforced disappearances constitutes

4050-442: The first international human rights bodies to react to the phenomenon of disappearances, following complaints made in connection with the Chilean military coup of September 11 , 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 February 4, 1976, illustrated such a case for the first time, when Alfonso Chanfreau , of French origin,

4131-521: 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

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4212-430: The former President of Bolivia , assassinated in Buenos Aires on 2 June 1976; Carmelo Soria , a UN diplomat working for the CEPAL , assassinated in July 1976; and Orlando Letelier , a former Chilean ambassador to the United States and minister in Allende's cabinet, assassinated after his release from internment and exile in Washington D.C. by a car bomb on 21 September 1976. This led to strained relations with

4293-401: The infamous Pawiak where they were subject to brutal interrogations by Nazi officials. After time spent in the prisons of Warsaw, Kraków, Radom , Kielce , Nowy Sącz , Tarnów , Lublin or Wiśnicz , the arrested Poles were transferred to Nazi concentration camps , most notably to the newly created camp of Auschwitz , as well as Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen . Approximately 3,500 members of

4374-459: 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,

4455-425: The knowledge of the attack. The Rome Statute defines enforced disappearances differently than international human rights law: [T]he 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

4536-401: 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

4617-422: 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. According to the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court , enforced disappearances constitute a crime against humanity when committed as a part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population with

4698-565: The leader of the Chilean Socialist Party, targeted for murder in 1975 by Pinochet; Volodia Teitelboim , writer and member of the Communist Party ; Pascal Allende , the nephew of Salvador Allende and president of the MIR , who escaped an assassination attempt in Costa Rica in March 1976; and US Congressman Edward Koch , who received death threats and was the potential assassination target by DINA and Uruguayan intelligence officers for his denunciation of Operation Condor. Furthermore, according to current investigations, Eduardo Frei Montalva ,

4779-437: 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

4860-455: The military dictatorship were killed for political reasons or as a result of political violence, and approximately 31,947 were tortured according to the later Valech Report , while 1,312 were exiled. The latter were chased all over the world by the intelligence agencies . In Latin America , this was made under the auspices of Operation Condor , a combined operation between the intelligence agencies of various South American countries, assisted by

4941-415: The military junta's attempt to silence the opposition and break the determination of the guerrillas. Missing people who are presumed to have been murdered in this and other ways are today referred to as "the disappeared" ( los desaparecidos ). Activist groups Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo were formed in 1977 by mothers and grandmothers of the "disappeared" victims of

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5022-408: The most controversial. Their exact numbers remain disputed, but the government has acknowledged a figure of just over 6,000 disappeared, now presumed dead. The war claimed a total toll of 150,000–200,000 lives. 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

5103-721: The official UN report of 2009, of the 82 countries where the cases of missing persons were identified, the largest number (more than 1000) transmitted were: Iraq (16,544), Sri Lanka (12,226), Argentina (3,449), Guatemala (3,155), Peru (3,009), Algeria (2,939), El Salvador (2,661) and Colombia (1,235). Other countries with numerous cases under denunciation (between 1000 and 100) are: Chile (907), China (116), Congo (114), Ethiopia (119), Philippines (780), Honduras (207), India (430), Indonesia (165), Iran (532), Lebanon (320), Morocco (268), Mexico (392), Nepal (672), Nicaragua (234), Russian Federation (478), Sudan , Yemen (155) and East Timor (504). During

5184-479: The overall count in the Dirty War. The victims would be shipped to places like a garage or basement and tortured for multiple days. Many of the disappeared 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

5265-466: The people were deported to Germany and imprisoned at locations such as the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp , where they ended up disappearing and no information about their whereabouts and fate was given as per point III of the decree: III. …In case German or foreign authorities inquire about such prisoners, they are to be told that they were arrested, but that the proceedings do not allow any further information. German Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel

5346-424: The planned German invasion of France . The anti-Polish AB-Aktion was prepared by Hans Frank , the commander of the General Government . It was also discussed with Soviet officials during a series of secretive Gestapo–NKVD Conferences . The first killings of Polish intelligentsia took place soon after the German invasion , lasting from autumn 1939 until spring 1940. It was called Operation Intelligenzaktion ,

5427-416: 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

5508-441: 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

5589-441: The protection of the law for a prolonged period of time The crime of forced disappearance begins with the history of the rights stated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen , formulated on August 26, 1789, in France by the authorities that emerged from the French Revolution , where it was already stated in Articles 7 and 12: Art. 7. No person may be charged, detained, or imprisoned except in cases determined by

5670-412: 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

5751-414: 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

5832-485: 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

5913-510: The technological advancements applied to wars that led to increased mortality among combatants and damage to civilian populations, movements for humanitarian awareness in Western societies resulted in the founding of the first humanitarian organizations known as the Red Cross in 1859, and the first international typification of abuses and crimes in the form of the 1864 Geneva Convention. In 1946, after

5994-451: The war, before being held legally accountable for their crimes. Forced disappearance An enforced disappearance (or forced disappearance ) is the secret abduction or imprisonment of a person with the support or acquiescence of a state followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person's fate or whereabouts with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law. Often, forced disappearance implies murder whereby

6075-538: The wider community, silencing others they think would oppose and criticize. Disappearances entail the violation of many fundamental human rights declared in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) . For the disappeared person, these include the right to liberty , the right to personal security and humane treatment (including freedom from torture), the right to a fair trial , to legal counsel and to equal protection under

6156-596: Was a Polish politician and writer. He was an activist in the Polish Socialist Party , editor in chief of Robotnik , and one of the primary activists and cofounders of the Centrolew alliance. He published several works on socialism and Polish politics. He took part in the defence of Warsaw in 1939 against the Nazi German aggression, organizing the volunteer militias . He was subsequently arrested and interrogated by

6237-575: Was arrested by the state police and remained missing since then. His abduction was later denied by the law enforcing agencies. On 17 April 2012, another prominent leader, Ilyas Ali , of the main opposition parties Bangladesh Nationalist Party disappeared by unknown armed personnel. The incident received 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

6318-784: Was 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. In 1977,

6399-671: Was condemned in connection with his role in the application of the "NN decree" by Adolf Hitler, although, as it had not been accepted at the time that enforced disappearances were crimes against humanity, the International Criminal Tribunal in Nuremberg found him guilty of war crimes. Since 1974, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights have been

6480-504: 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. In parallel with the resolutions of the international organizations, several non-governmental organizations drafted projects for an international convention. In 1981,

6561-466: Was used as a detention center by the DINA , the secret police. Furthermore, many other important officials of Allende's government were tracked down by the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) during Operation Condor . Thus, General Carlos Prats , Pinochet's predecessor and army commander under Allende, who had resigned rather than support the moves against Allende's government, was assassinated by

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