Forced disappearances

In international human rights law, a forced disappearance (or enforced disappearance) occurs when a person is secretly abducted or imprisoned by a state or political organization or by a third party with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of a state or political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person's fate and whereabouts, with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which came into force on 1 July 2002, when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed at any civilian population, a "forced disappearance" qualifies as a crime against humanity and, thus, is not subject to a statute of limitations. On 20 December 2006, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.

Often, forced disappearance implies murder. The victim in such a case is abducted, illegally detained and often tortured during interrogation, and killed, with the body hidden. Typically, a murder will be surreptitious, with the corpse disposed of to escape discovery so that the person apparently vanishes. The party committing the murder has plausible deniability, as nobody can provide evidence of the victim's death.

"Disappearing" political rivals is also a way for regimes to engender feelings of complicity in populations. The difficulty of publicly fighting a government that murders in secret can result in widespread pretense that everything is normal, as it did in the Dirty War in Argentina.

In international human rights law, disappearances at the hands of the state have been codified as "enforced" or "forced disappearances" since the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action. For example, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court defines enforced disappearance as a crime against humanity, and the practice is specifically addressed by the OAS's Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons. There is also some authority indicating that enforced disappearances occurring during armed conflict, such as the Third Reich's Night and Fog program, may constitute war crimes.

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