Enforced disappearance

[10] The report of the Working Group to Investigate the Situation of Human Rights in that country, which was submitted to the United Nations Commission on February 4, 1976, illustrated such a case for the first time, when Alfonso Chanfreau, of French origin, was arrested in July 1974 at his home in Santiago de Chile.

[13] By then, the Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel had made an international appeal that, with the support of the French government,[14] obtained the response of the General Assembly in the form of resolution 33/173 of 20 December 1978, which specifically referred to "missing persons" and requested the Commission on Human Rights to make appropriate recommendations.

On 6 March 1979, the Commission authorized the appointment as experts of Dr. Felix Ermacora and Waleed M. Sadi, who later resigned due to political pressure,[15] to study the question of the fate of disappearances in Chile, issuing a report to the General Assembly on 21 November 1979.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee, established in 1977 in accordance with article 28 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to monitor compliance by states parties with their obligations, issued in March 1982 and July 1983, two sentences condemning the State of Uruguay for the cases of Eduardo Bleier,[19] a former member of the Communist Party of Uruguay, residing in Hungary and Israel, disappeared after his arrest in 1975 in Montevideo, and Elena Quinteros Almeida, missing since her arrest at the Venezuelan Embassy in Montevideo in June 1976, in an incident that led to the suspension of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

[30] On 20 December 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the text of the International Convention on the Forced Disappearance of Persons after more than 25 years of development and was signed in Paris on 6 February 2007[31] at a ceremony to which representatives of the 53 first signatory countries attended and in which 20 of them immediately ratified it.

In the official UN report of 2009, of the 82 countries where the cases of missing persons were identified, the largest number (more than 1000) transmitted were:[34] Iraq (16,544), Sri Lanka (12,226), Argentina (3,449), Guatemala (3,155), Peru (3,009), Algeria (2,939), El Salvador (2,661) and Colombia (1,235).

Other countries with numerous cases under denunciation (between 1000 and 100) are: Chile (907), China (116), Congo (114), Ethiopia (119), Philippines (780), Honduras (207), India (430), Indonesia (165), Iran (532), Lebanon (320), Morocco (268), Mexico (392), Nepal (672), Nicaragua (234), Russian Federation (478), Sudan, Yemen (155) and East Timor (504).

During the Algerian Civil War, which began in 1992 as militant Islamist guerrillas attacked the military government that had annulled an Islamic Salvation Front victory, thousands of people were forcibly disappeared.

[37] During Argentina's Dirty War and Operation Condor, many alleged political dissidents were abducted or illegally detained and kept in clandestine detention centers such as Navy Petty-Officers School or "ESMA", where they were questioned, tortured, and almost always killed.

Hanchar and Krasouski disappeared the same day of a broadcast on state television in which President Alexander Lukashenko ordered the chiefs of his security services to crack down on "opposition scum".

Mathematician Boris Weisfeiler is thought to have disappeared near Colonia Dignidad, a German colony founded by Nazi Christian minister Paul Schäfer in Parral, which was used as a detention center by the DINA, the secret police.

A year later, the deaths of 119 opponents abroad were claimed as the product of infighting between Marxist factions, the DINA setting up a disinformation campaign to propagate this thesis, Operation Colombo.

Furthermore, according to current investigations, Eduardo Frei Montalva, the Christian Democrat President of Chile from 1964 to 1970, may have been poisoned in 1982 by a toxin produced by DINA biochemist Eugenio Berrios.

His wife shortly received a phone call from him (with caller ID from Shenzhen) in which he explained in Mandarin (not Cantonese in which they would usually converse) he had to assist with some investigation for a while, and he could not be home nor provide more information for a while.

Towards the end of October 2015, four co-owners and managers of the bookstore and publisher, Gui Minhai, Lui Bo (呂波), Cheung Jiping (張志平), and Lam Wing-kei, went missing from Thailand and mainland China, believed to be detained by the Central Case Examination Group.

[91][92] Amnesty International urged Egypt to conduct an effective investigation into the disappearance of the family, saying, "Seizing a young mother with her one-year-old baby and confining them in a room for 23 months outside the protection of the law and with no contact with the outside world show that Egyptian authorities' ongoing campaign to stamp out dissent and instill fear has reached a new level of brutality.

[95] For example, in January 2010 four men were abducted from Benin by Equatorial Guinean security forces, held in secret detention, subjected to torture, and executed in August 2010 immediately after being convicted by a military court.

[96] During World War II, Nazi Germany set up secret police forces, including branches of the Gestapo in occupied countries, to hunt down known or suspected dissidents or partisans.

The family and friends of the two fear the disappearance of more people following United Nations' warning to security forces and other unnamed militia groups, of carrying out a campaign of kidnapping and 'deliberate killings' in Iraq.

[114] Several Moroccan Army personnel suspected of being implicated in the 1970s coups against King Hassan II were held in secret detention camps such as Tazmamart, where some of them died due to poor conditions or lack of medical treatment.

[119][120] Following the 2021 military coup and ongoing opposition movement, thousands of people have been abducted by Myanmar security forces, including politicians, election officials, journalists, activists, and protesters.

[135] Women's rights activist Noof Al Maadeed who returned to Qatar in 2021 after voluntarily renouncing her asylum claim in the UK was last seen on the 13th of October 2021, weeks after arrival in Doha.

In March 2005 the court issued the first rulings on Chechnya, finding the Russian government guilty of violating the right to life and the prohibition of torture with respect to civilians who had died or been forcibly disappeared at the hands of Russia's federal troops.

According to La Nueva España newspaper, the data of people buried in mass graves brought before the Audiencia Nacional court on 16 October 2008 are the following:[162] Since 1980, 12,000 Sri Lankans have gone missing after being detained by security forces.

[163] The figures are still lower than the then-current Sri Lankan government's 2009 estimate of 17,000 people missing,[164] which was made after it came to power with a commitment to correct the human rights issues.

In 2013, the Bangkok Post reported that Police General Vasit Dejkunjorn, founder of the Thai Spring movement, told a seminar that forced disappearance is a tool which corrupt state power uses to eliminate individuals deemed a threat.

[176] Two Thai activists went missing while living in exile in Vientiane, Laos: Itthipol Sukpaen, who vanished in June 2016; and Wuthipong "Ko Tee" Kochathamakun, who disappeared from his residence in July 2017.

[180] Siam Theerawut, Chucheep Chivasut, and Kritsana Thapthai, three Thai anti-monarchy activists, went missing on 8 May 2019, when they are thought to have been extradited to Thailand from Vietnam after they attempted to enter the country with counterfeit Indonesian passports.

"[191][192] The United States Department of Defense kept the identity of the individuals it held in the US Guantanamo Bay Naval Base ("Gitmo") in Cuba secret, from its opening on 11 January 2002 to 20 April 2006.

Ackerman asserted that the facility was the "scene of secretive work by special police units," where the "basic constitutional rights" of "poor, black and brown" Chicago city residents were violated.