Enforced Disappearance: Definition and Significance

Although individuals being abducted and detained by states without legal recourse has a long history, the concept of enforced disappearance or involuntary disappearance has emerged in international law, human rights, and civil rights in the 1970s. During the decade, military rulers in Latin America adopted tactics of making people ‘disappeared’ to silence dissenting views and prevent possible protests against the authoritarian practices. Victims of these state-led systematic incidents were initially described as “missing.” But the question of the state’s deliberate and systematic role in this matter gained importance in the wake of widespread occurrence by the military regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. In 1975, the United Nations Human Rights Commission’s statement and resolution described those who were the victims of such practices as “persons unaccounted for” or “those who cannot be accounted for”. In 1980, with the establishment of the ‘Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance’ by the United Nations, the term ‘Enforced Disappearance’ gained currency. In 1992, the adoption of the Declaration of the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance by the United Nations General Assembly brought to the fore the responsibility of states and the international organizations in this regard. In 2006, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED) was adopted by the UN. This convention came into force in 2010.

This report adopted the term enforced disappearance from Article 2 of the ICPPED. According to the Convention:

“enforced disappearance” is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the state or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the state, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.

Three points of this definition are worth noting. Enforced disappearance has three elements: they are (1) depriving the person of freedom against his will; (2) the involvement of public officials, at least with their knowledge; (3) to deny or conceal the freedom of the person who has disappeared. These three points clearly make a distinction with ‘missing’ persons, those who are absconding, or those who are ‘voluntarily fugitive’.

Considering the severity of this phenomenon, particularly its impacts on families, societies and the nature of governance, and occurrence as a violation of fundamental rights of citizens, it has been described in the preamble of the Convention as a ‘crime against humanity.’ Despite a different definition of the concept adopted in the Rome Statutes, it also has described enforced disappearance as a crime against humanity.