Victims of Enforced Disappearances: a wound that continues to bleed
Since 2011, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances has been commemorated every 30 August. This was established in 2010 by resolution A/RES/65/209 of the United Nations General Assembly, which expressed concern about the increase in enforced disappearances around the world and the growing number of reports of harassment of witnesses or relatives of disappeared persons.
Enforced disappearance has been used as a strategy to infuse terror in many societies. The sense of insecurity and anguish due to the uncertainty it generates affects the entire community as a whole and perpetuates fears for generations. For this reason, it is considered that the victims of this crime are not only the persons who are disappeared, but also their entire social and family environment. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has even said that this constitutes a form of torture and impairment of mental integrity.
According to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in certain circumstances of massive or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, enforced disappearance constitutes a crime against humanity, which is imprescriptible, with the obligation to make reparation to the families of the victims and to demand the truth about the disappearance of their family and friends. Likewise, due to its gravity, the universal and regional instruments provide that in no case may exceptional circumstances such as a state or threat of war, internal political instability or any public threat be invoked as a justification for it; nor may this crime be justified by obedience to an order or instruction from a public authority, whether civilian, military or otherwise.
According to Amnesty International, the best-known case of mass enforced disappearances in the 20th century is the last dictatorship in Argentina. During the dictatorship, between 1976 and 1983, the security forces committed systematic human rights violations, abducting some 30,000 people, torturing, executing on a large scale, throwing the victims alive from military planes into the Río de la Plata or the sea, or disposing of them in other destinations that are still unknown, stealing babies born in captivity, among many other atrocious crimes. In addition, the whereabouts of most of the people reported as disappeared are still unknown, so they have not been recovered and returned to their families. In many cases, it has also not been possible to reconstruct what specifically happened to each of them. This has a great impact on access to the truth for relatives and society as a whole.
Nevertheless, the Argentinean case is paradigmatic in that, since the reopening of trials in 2003 with the repeal of the Due Obedience and Full Stop laws, many of those responsible have been tried by ordinary civilian courts in recent years. To date, it is estimated that there are around 1,200 convictions. In this regard, in 2019, by decision of the President of the Nation, Alberto Fernandez, the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI) was intervened, and three physical archives were found with 250,000 files with information on detained/disappeared persons, which will help to consolidate the processes of truth and justice. Despite this, international organisations such as the UN Committee against Enforced Disappearances or national organisations such as the Centre for Legal and Social Studies of Argentina have expressed their concern that, more than 40 years after the end of the last military dictatorship in Argentina, it is still not known how many people disappeared, due to unjustified delays in the proceedings, which in some cases lead to situations of impunity either because of the death of the accused or of the victims and witnesses. It is estimated that approximately 350 cases in which responsibility for kidnapping, torture and murder are being analysed are still open and active. Faced with this lack of information, human rights organisations had to limit themselves to estimating the figure and concluded that the disappeared were close to 30,000, a number that over the years has become an emblem of the struggle for ‘Memory, Truth and Justice’.
Meanwhile, this country, which has been a pioneer thanks to the struggle of the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and the work of professionals such as the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, and which has become a global example of justice, has seen a series of regressions in recent years. Between 2016 and 2019, after a campaign to discredit victims and organisations, the processes were paralysed under the argument that it was necessary to audit the legitimacy of the requests. Today, as found in a report by the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) and the group of human rights organisations that integrate Memoria Abierta, the politics of memory, truth and justice are once again at risk in the country: in recent months the new government has dismantled all state areas in charge of the search for the truth for the victims of enforced disappearances, with cuts in public funds and staff dismissals, as well as facilitating meetings in the federal prison of Ezeiza with convicted genocidaires, with the intention of promoting laws beneficial to them. It has also put an end to the work of the Team for Documentary Survey and Analysis of the Armed Forces Archives, discontinuing the analysis of declassified documentation from the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI), dismantling the Collective Memory and Social Inclusion Programme that publicises trials against humanity, and by Decree 727/2024 of 14 August last, it has resolved to dismantle the National Commission for the Right to Identity and the Special Investigation Unit attached to it, whose purpose was to investigate the disappearance of children as a consequence of the State terrorism, a practice it has been carrying out uninterruptedly for the last two decades.
It is worrying that international consensus on the fight against major human rights violations is being questioned in a context of increasing violence in many countries around the world. In their report ‘Lethal but preventable attacks: Killings and enforced disappearances of human rights defenders’, Amnesty International revealed that states around the world are failing in their obligation to effectively protect human rights defenders from these crimes.
Enforced disappearance has become a global problem that does not only affect one particular region of the world. The number of enforced disappearances in many countries has concerned the international community in recent years. Today, Syria, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Venezuela and Colombia are some of the countries most affected by this problem, with considerable difficulties in reporting and access to justice, leading to the universe of victims being much larger than recorded. In the past, enforced disappearances were mainly the product of military dictatorships, but today they can be perpetrated in complex situations of internal conflict, especially as a method of political repression of opponents. Moreover, as they respond to different factors, without a thorough investigation it is very difficult to know by which of them they were produced, impeding the consolidation of justice.
Past experiences and this present context make the prevention and pursuit of justice and truth an urgent imperative. The importance of states guaranteeing this is vital today, given that this practice, which violates countless human rights, continues to be highly conflictive and consolidated in many countries.
Federica Carnevale, FIBGAR collaborator.
30 August 2024.
