On 30 August, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) joins the wider international community in marking the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. This year, the International Day also falls on the twentieth anniversary of the adoption by the UN General Assembly of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
But the Convention was the end of a journey on a far longer road.
The word “disappearance” did not come from the States, nor did it come from lawyers. It originated from the families themselves, who were victims of the practice. When opposition figures were seized in Guatemala in March 1966, in the case that became known as “los 28”, it was their mothers and wives who organized themselves around the demands for truth and justice concerning the disappeared persons. When the Argentine lawyer Néstor Martins was seized in Buenos Aires together with his client Nildo Centeno on 16 December 1970, it was his wife and his law partner who went to the Federal Police the following day to report his disappearance.
That case reached the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as Case 1701, the first case of enforced disappearance to come before it, and this is where the word “disappearance” was first used by an international institution. In May 1972, the Commission adopted a resolution referring, in its own terms, to “el secuestro y desaparición” of the two men. It then archived the file on the reasoning that international protection could not be invoked without proof of the direct or indirect participation of government agents, or of their failure to suppress the crime. The word was available. The law was not.
At the global level, the practice of enforced disappearance impelled the creation in 1980 of the very first UN human rights mechanism to address a thematic issue, with the establishment of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances by the UN Human Rights Commission. The Working Group could take up the case of a named individual, in any country, with a view to clarifying the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, and it could act with urgency because a life might depend on the speed of the response. Action by the Working Group did not require a treaty of the consent of the concerned State. It was the refusal of families to accept silence that forced this action.
The rest followed within a decade. In 1983, the General Assembly of the Organization of American States declared that the practice of enforced disappearance of persons in the Americas was an affront to the conscience of the hemisphere and constituted a crime against humanity, the first intergovernmental body to say so. This was firmly established on 29 July 1988, in Velásquez Rodríguez v. Honduras, when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights delivered the first ruling by any international court on this crime, establishing the multiple and continuing character of the violation and the State’s duty to investigate it.
Sixteen years after the word “disappear” had reached the international institutions, the Court gave it legal content: to be disappeared was no longer simply to be missing, but to have been taken forcefully by a State that then denied or declined to acknowledge its action, and to remain so, in law, until the truth of what happened is established.
The normative framework then took shape: the United Nations Declaration of 1992, the Inter-American Convention of 1994, the inclusion of enforced disappearance in the Rome Statute in 1998 as a crime against humanity when committed on a widespread or systematic scale, and the Convention of 2006. The Convention has firmly established a common global definition of enforced disappearance, namely the deprivation of liberty by State agents or those acting under their authority or acquiescence, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or concealing the fate whereabout the disappearance, which places the person outside the protection of the law.
The ICJ was closely involved throughout. ICJ Commissioner Reed Brody, then a legal adviser at the ICJ, and Niall McDermot, ICJ Secretary-General, worked on the drafting of the 1992 UN Declaration alongside Nigel Rodley, then Amnesty International’s Legal Adviser and later President of the ICJ, and FEDEFAM, the Federation of Associations of Families of the Disappeared. Fifteen years later, ICJ lawyers, among them Federico Andreu-Guzmán and Cordula Droege, contributed to the drafting of the 2006 Convention.
At the request of Louis Joinet, Chairman-Rapporteur of the Sub-Commission’s Working Group on the Administration of Justice, the ICJ and Amnesty International convened the expert meeting of June 1996 that examined the preliminary draft convention, and the ICJ took part again in the Geneva meeting of November 1997. The ICJ worked to develop the legal and conceptual underpinnings of enforced disappearance as a distinct offense, consisting of compound human rights violations, that could simply be captured by existing instruments such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on Enforced Disappearances, as some had argued. In 2001, the ICJ issued a publication of articles on this and successfully advocated for the UN Human Rights Commission to appoint an independent expert, mandated to Professor Manfred Nowak (then an ICJ Commissioner) to study the question. Professor Nowak’s report paved the way for the UN Human Rights Commission to establish an intergovernmental Working Group to elaborate on the UN Convention. The ICJ engaged closely with the Working Group, led by French Ambassador Bernard Kessedjian, to ensure a strong and robust Convention.
Since then, the ICJ has equipped practitioners, including through Practitioners’ Guide No. 9, on investigation and sanction, and No. 10, on the rights of family members, and in January 2025, it helped convene the first World Congress on Enforced Disappearances, which opened, as it should have, with the testimony of families.
Twenty years after the Convention was adopted, 78 States, fewer than half the membership of the United Nations, have ratified or acceded to it. In every region where the practice persists, it is still overwhelmingly the relatives of the disappeared who search, who document, who litigate, and who keep the demand alive when institutions fall silent.
This anniversary falls at a moment when the force of international law is under strain. Institutions built to hold power to account are being defunded, discredited, and openly attacked, including through a declared campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court. It is precisely now that we must redouble our efforts to ensure that the standards and institutions that protect persons from enforced disappearance are bolstered, not weakened. Neither the prohibition of enforced disappearance nor the machinery to enforce it existed when they were first needed. Both were built against resistance by relatives who had no standing and who kept pushing for decades until the law existed. That is not a framework to be defended from a distance. It is one that has to be built, and rebuilt, by those who insist on it.
On this day, the ICJ reaffirms its commitment to standing alongside victims, survivors, and their families in their search for truth, justice, and reparation. It calls on all States to ratify or accede to the Convention and to implement it fully; to recognize the competence of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances to receive individual and inter-State communications; to ensure accountability for perpetrators; and to guarantee that no one is subjected to enforced disappearance in any circumstances whatsoever.
Santiago A. Canton,
ICJ Secretary-General