“Disappearance” is a practice that today it is a widespread phenomenon across the world. Cases of Enforced Disappearance are observed in countries all around the globe, such as Guatemala, Philippines, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Syria, Ukraine, and Turkey.
In 1980 the UN’s Human Rights Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights set up a Working Group on Disappearances as its first thematic human rights mechanism with a universal mandate. In 1992 the UN General Assembly approved a declaration on Enforced Disappearances and, in 2006, finalized the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
According to Article 2 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance: “‘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.” Even if the state is in State of Emergency, according to Article 1.2 of the same Convention, “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for enforced disappearance.”
