Definition of Forced Disappearance

Forced disappearance is a concept of very recent creation and schematization that, according to the definitions of the international legal framework, is that detention carried out arbitrarily by agents related to the State or a political organization where they are also deprived of liberty and to give information on the whereabouts of the victim to relatives and acquaintances.

Quote (APA)

Gemma Alvarado | Aug. 2022
Degree in psychology

It includes a series of systematic violations carried out in a premeditated manner to the rights and integrity of a person, directly or indirectly by the figure of the State, placed at different times are violated human rights. At first, it implies the detention against the will of the person who is disappeared, then the refusal of the State or the representatives in their name, to give him a due process of detention and, therefore, legal follow-up and that finally he refuses to give reports on the fate of said person. It is a crime that, also due to its legal nature, does not prescribe as long as the disappeared person does not appear, alive or dead. In this sense, cases of forced disappearance usually remain open as long as the State does not provide reports or full knowledge of the whereabouts.

historical references

Enforced disappearance being used as strategy of physical and psychological terror in order to repress and subdue another human being is not recent. The oldest data refers to the French absolutism of the 18th century, where the king issued orders of imprisonment to people he considered opponents and These people were imprisoned without access to a trial and other legal tools, eventually disappearing without a trace (López, 2017).

In the 20th century, it is feasible to identify several examples of forced disappearance in different historical events, since that it is during this century that it emerges in a public and open way, for which it becomes indispensable define it.

In World War II, forced disappearance was used as a tactic of war, to maintain power and control over populations. Specifically, the implementation of the decree Night and Fog for Nazi Germany in order to end the resistance during the war.

During this century, in the former Soviet Union, the arbitrary detention of opponents was also common, making them prisoners and without further access to their whereabouts.

All these antecedents allow us to state that forced disappearance in practice has been present in our history, but that the dimensions in that arises and how it evolves until what was documented during the Second World War, it exposes how these practices were later taken up again and reproduced in different types of regimes years later, in order to be able this time to systematically and massively eliminate thousands of people in different parts of the world.

Forced disappearance in Latin America

In the case of Latin America, during the seventies, military dictatorships arrived in the Southern Cone and were established with them massive and arbitrary arrests, as well as multiple human rights violations that had been unprecedented Similar. Thus, forced disappearance became a very common tool used by the services of intelligence of the Latin American countries. An entire parastatal apparatus was installed that operated for the State without leaving a trace and information about the thousands of people who were being detained, much less their whereabouts.

Different organizations Latin American social groups made up largely of relatives of the disappeared, but also of journalists, activists, political leaders, intellectuals, etc. They looked for international means to be able to denounce what was happening. In 1980, in the face of international pressure regarding what was happening in Latin America, the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances was created, where it was intended analyze the different cases that arose in the world and had to do their initial work to begin to glimpse what forced disappearance was and what its characteristics were.

Ariel Dulitzky (2017) mentions that from this moment they began to search for a concept that would be accepted universally to define enforced disappearances within a broad spectrum of human rights violations humans.

Forced disappearance and the struggle for human rights

Forced disappearance as a concept is formally recognized until 1994, when the Organization of American States (OAS) in the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons of 1994 recognized forced disappearance within its framework legal.

In 1998, the Rome Statute recognized enforced disappearance as a crime of It hurts humanity. And finally, in 2007, the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance enacts the first law universally against enforced disappearance.

The justice processes of forced disappearance are extremely complex and difficult, since it is a paradox: since there is no victim, there is no crime to judge; impunity is present and since the State is the perpetrator and at the same time the judge makes the situation of forced disappearance even more paradoxical in a legal, since the conditions of trial and complaint are imposed by the State itself, which in some countries represents an enormous challenge to face when making Justice.