Commemorating the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances

On 30 August 2026, the Amman Center for Human Rights Studies (ACHRS) joins the international community in commemorating the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. With this year marking 20 years since the adoption of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, it is high-time for the international community to move beyond expressions of commitment and towards meaningful action. Given the persistent failure of States to adequately prevent, investigate, and address enforced disappearances, there is an urgent need for stronger international mechanisms capable of helping victims and their families.

Determining the precise scale of the problem remains challenging. By their very nature, enforced disappearances– that is, the detention of a person by State agents, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the detention or concealment of the person’s fate or whereabouts– are deliberately hidden from official records, making comprehensive and reliable estimates difficult to obtain. While the Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) reported that, since its establishment in 1980, the Working Group has transmitted 61,626 cases to 115 States, this figure represents but a fraction of the problem.

Syria offers perhaps the starkest illustration. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, at least 181,312 individuals– including 5,332 children and 9,201 women– were arbitrarily detained or forcibly disappeared in Syria between 2011 and 2025. Yet enforced disappearances are prevalent throughout the Arab world. In Iraq, estimates range from 250,000 to one million disappeared persons. Lebanon’s official figure stands at 17,415, while human rights organisations have documented 1,547 cases of disappearance in Yemen. In Egypt, 4,253 cases of enforced disappearance were documented between 2015 and 2023.

Behind every figure is a missing person– and a family desperately searching for a loved one. Yet the international system is not designed to adequately support them in that search. The Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) monitors States’ implementation of the Convention, registers cases of enforced disappearance, and urges States to investigate them. Its mandate, however, is limited to States parties to the Convention. The Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), by contrast, has a universal mandate and can transmit cases to any State for investigation. Both mechanisms are vital to holding States accountable, but neither is designed to find the disappeared. Their reliance on State cooperation– often from the very authorities responsible for the disappearance– severely limits their ability to do so.

For search and identification efforts, families must navigate an extraordinarily fragmented landscape of humanitarian organisations, civil society groups, and specialised investigative bodies. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) plays a central role through its Central Tracing Agency (CTA), which helps trace missing persons and restore contact between separated family members. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is similarly instrumental in exhuming mass graves and using DNA analysis to identify the dead. Alongside these efforts, open-source investigative organisations such as Forensic Architecture and the Center for Information Resilience (CIR) use satellite imagery, geolocation, and publicly available digital information to reconstruct events and help locate missing persons. Civil society bodies are also crucial, as they maintain close links to communities and possess information that can be critical to search efforts.

Coordination among these actors remains a significant challenge, often hindering efforts to locate and identify missing persons. Yet a potential model already exists. The Independent Institution on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic (IIMP) is a unique mechanism that adopts a victim-centred approach and emphasises complementarity with existing international actors to clarify the fate and whereabouts of all missing persons in Syria. Rather than duplicating existing efforts, the IIMP is designed to facilitate coordination among them, as demonstrated by its Four Actor Cooperation Declaration. The Declaration establishes shared principles for coordinated action and technical cooperation between the IIMP, the ICRC, the ICMP, and Syria’s National Commission for Missing Persons (NCMP). Although the institution remains in its early stages, it offers a promising model that could be adapted and scaled to strengthen coordination and facilitate the search for missing persons beyond Syria.

Losing a loved one is devastating; not knowing their fate or whereabouts is unbearable. The international community has a responsibility to ease this burden by ensuring families have access to effective search and identification efforts. Yet the current system is too fragmented and ill-equipped to meet this need. On this International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, ACHRS calls on the international community to make good on its “Victims First. Actions Now” slogan by:

• Establishing an international body to coordinate search efforts for missing and disappeared persons globally, using the IIMP as a model;
• Leveraging new AI-assisted technologies for the search of missing persons;
• Committing States with active cases identified by the CED and WGEID to clarify the whereabouts and fate of all missing and disappeared persons by 2030, while encouraging the General Assembly to suspend States that fail to comply from membership in UN human rights bodies, including the Human Rights Council.