WORKING GROUP ON DISAPPEARANCES TO MEET IN NEW YORK FROM 30 APRIL TO 4 MAY

From 30 April to 4 May, the group of experts charged by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights with ensuring that involuntary disappearances are investigated will meet at United Nations Headquarters in New York. The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances was established in 1980, and was the first of the thematic extra-conventional mechanisms created by the Commission on Human Rights.

Its mandate is to act as a channel of communication between families of missing persons and the government concerned and to ensure that individual cases are investigated and the whereabouts of disappeared persons clarified. It also assists governments in the implementation of the Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and of other relevant international instruments.

The working group meets three times a year -- twice in Geneva and once in New York. Cases are submitted to it by representatives of human rights organizations, associations of relatives of missing persons, and families or witnesses. It retains a case on its files as long as the exact whereabouts of a missing person has not been determined. State responsibility for disappearances continues to exist irrespective of changes of government.

Five members, acting as experts in their individual capacities, compose the working group. Its current Chairman-Rapporteur is Ivan Tosevski (the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia). The other members are Anuar Zainal Abidin (Malaysia), J. Bayo Adekanye (Nigeria), Diego Garcia-Sayan (Peru) and Manfred Nowak (Austria). The Commission on Human Rights extended the mandate of the working group on Monday 23 April for three years.

During 2000, the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances transmitted 487 new cases of disappearances, which occurred in 29 countries. Ninety-five cases were transmitted under its urgent action appeals procedure to 20 countries. Currently, the working group has 45,998 outstanding cases on its registers. The highest number of reports of enforced or involuntary disappearances in 2000 occurred in Indonesia (29) and India (21).

Since its establishment in 1980, the working group has transmitted over 49,500 cases of alleged enforced disappearance to 76 governments. Out of these, however, only some 3,500 cases have been clarified. Countries with the highest number of outstanding cases since 1980 are: Algeria (1,074); Argentina (3,377); El Salvador (2,270); Guatemala (2,982); Iraq (16,384); Peru (2,368) and Sri Lanka (11,682). Currently 73 countries have outstanding cases before the working group.

At its fifty-seventh session, the Commission on Human Rights expressed deep concern about the increase in enforced or involuntary disappearances in various regions of the world, and about the growing number of reports of harassment, ill-treatment and intimidation of witnesses to disappearances or relatives of persons who have disappeared.

In its most recent resolution (E/CN.4/2001/L.57), the Commission urged governments to cooperate with the working group, in particular by inviting it to visit their countries, by continuing their efforts to shed light on the fates of the missing persons and by making provision in their legal systems for victims or their families to seek fair and adequate reparation. The Commission also urged governments to take steps to protect witnesses, lawyers and families of missing persons and encouraged the working group to pay particular attention to cases transmitted to it that referred to ill-treatment, threat or intimidation of witnesses to enforced disappearances or relatives of disappeared persons, and to cases of disappearance of persons working for the promotion and protection of human rights.

For further information, please contact:  Miguel de la Lama, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (New York), tel: (212) 963-1361, e-mail: delalama.hchr@unog.ch; or Yasmin Padamsee, United Nations Department of Public Information. tel: (212) 963-7704, e-mail: padamsee@un.org.

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