Several GHR members were already involved in the creation in 1980 of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) and in the drafting of the Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearances (1992). They participated actively in the negotiations on the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which entered into force in December 2010 (ICED).
In this project, GHR has monitored all the sessions of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances (CED) and convened between 2012 and 2021 seven Experts Seminars with the CED and the WGEID. Most of them were co-sponsored by the delegations of Argentina, France, Chile and the Netherlands. They focused on the working methods and rules of procedures of both bodies, the cooperation between them, the strengthening of NGOs coalitions and the campaign for universal ratification of the convention.
GHR first Expert Seminar (November 2012) reviewed and compared the mandates and working methods of CED and WGEID and analyzed their complementarity. The second Seminar (November 2013) was on ‘the pivotal role of the CED in the treaty bodies and in the thematic procedures’ to promotea system-wide coherence of both doctrine and action on enforced disappearances. The third Seminar (September 2014) analyzed how CED, WGEID and other Committees dealt with communications on regarding enforced disappearances.
GHR was entrusted with the coordination of NGOs activities before and during the first Conference of the States Parties to the ICED (19 December 2016), which decided that, after its first period of activities, the CED would continue to monitor the Convention.
As a follow-up to this Conference, GHR convened its fourth Seminar (15 March 2017) together with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy Studies (GCSP). All the CED members attended. The fifth Seminar (13 November 2018) was devoted to the advanced screening of the Documentary ‘The Subversives’ (on the pioneering work of former UN Human Rights Director Theo Van Boven) for CED and representatives of relatives. The sixth Seminar (27 February 2019) was a major event during the 40th session of the HR-Council with the screening of ‘The Subversives’, with a round-table chaired by the Dutch Ambassador and animated by the Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights.
GHR also regularly presents oral statements during CED sessions. On 7 October 2019, GHR raised two concerns, the increasing pattern of arbitrary arrests and secret detention, and cases of enforced disappearances of migrants. Following questions from CED members, GHR detailed these concerns in a letter to the CED dated 10 October 2019:
| ‘Many migrants are disappearing, often voluntarily to escape States’ scrutiny and the risk of being forced back to their country of origins. But many migrants also disappear forcibly as they are in the hands of traffickers to cross seas and borders. We are not expert on this subject. We have no figures, but we believe this problem should be studied, and questions could be asked when examining the reports of States parties from regions where massive migration flows take place, for instance in Europe (persons coming from Africa and the Middle East, in particular form Syria and Iraq, in Latin America with the flow of migrants from Venezuela), in South East Asia, in particular with the Rohingas’. GHR letter to the CED, 10 October 2019 |
GHR participated in the event marking the 40th Anniversary of the WGEID (14 February 2020). In May 2020, it addressed a communication to the CED to support the decision of the CED members to continue working during the Covid crisis: ‘All cases of disappearances are urgent matters. Indeed, dealing with the consideration of hundreds of urgent appeals, (…) adopting views on communications (…), and deciding on the follow-up procedure with the States, cannot wait for the end of the pandemic’.
