UN alarmed over increasing number of enforced disappearances

MANILA, Philippines - The United Nations has denounced the “alarming” number of acts tantamount to enforced disappearances.

As of 2014, the UN has been actively considering 43,250 cases of enforced disappearance in 88 countries.

In the Philippines, around 2,300 people remain missing since the 1970s when martial law was declared in the country, according to the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearance (AFAD).

In the past five years, 26 people were reported to have gone missing in the Philippines, the first country in Asia to enact an anti-enforced disappearance law. But no perpetrator has been convicted under the law.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed to all member states to ratify or accede to the legal instrument prohibiting enforced disappearances.

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance affirms unequivocally that the use of enforced disappearance is illegal under any circumstances, including war, internal political instability or any other public emergency.

The UN General Assembly welcomed the adoption of the Convention and decided to declare Aug. 30 as the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.

The Convention, in effect since 2010, has been signed by 93 states and ratified by 50.

“Victims of enforced disappearances are deprived of their liberty, kept in secret detention and seldom released. Often their fate remains unknown; they are frequently tortured and in constant fear of being killed. Even if they are eventually set free, the physical and psychological scars stay with them for the rest of their lives. The victims’ families and loved ones also suffer immense anguish,” Ban said.

“It is time for an end to all enforced disappearances,” he added.

He noted that far from being a practice employed only in the past by military dictatorships, enforced disappearance continues to be used by some states.

“In recent years, there has also been an alarming number of acts by non-state actors, including armed extremist and terrorist groups, that are tantamount to enforced disappearances and that are also gross abuses of human rights,” he said.

In the past year alone, the UN’s Committee on Enforced Disappearances and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances received 246 requests from family members across the world to take urgent action.

“This figure is just a fraction of the thousands of cases that are never reported either because of security conditions or because of a lack of knowledge of the existence of international mechanisms that can help,” Ban said.

The Committee on Enforced Disappearances and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances called on states to establish and activate protocols for the immediate search of disappeared persons, in a systematic way, across the world.

Experts from the two UN committees explained that the 246 recent cases of enforced disappearances that they had been working on over the past year “are a clear indication that this heinous practice is still used in a number of countries.”

Those cases are only the “tip of the iceberg” of thousands that are never reported either because of fear of reprisals or because of prevailing security conditions, they added.

The lack of resources and the insufficient awareness of existing international mechanisms are other reasons many cases of enforced disappearances are never reported to the UN.

The experts called on governments to take action as soon as a case of disappearance is reported to the authorities and to implement all necessary measures to seek and find the disappeared person and to avoid irreparable harm.