COMMITTEE ON ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES CONCLUDES EIGHTH SESSION
The Committee on Enforced Disappearances closed its eighth session today, after adopting its concluding observations and recommendations on the reports of Mexico, Armenia and Serbia, on their implementation of the provisions of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. It also agreed list of issues on Iraq and Montenegro, whose reports it would consider at the next session.
At a public meeting to close the session, Committee Rapporteur Santiago Corcuera Cabezut presented highlights of the session in his report. He recalled that during its two-week session, the Committee reviewed the reports of Mexico (CED/C/MEX/1), Armenia (CED/C/ARM/1) and Serbia (CED/C/SRB/1), and also met with States and civil society on matters related to the implementation of the Convention.
Committee Chairperson Emmanuel Decaux said, in his concluding statement for the session, that the closing of the eighth session also marked the end of the first cycle of the work of the Committee. Since the entry into force of the Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance on 23 December 2010, the ratifications had doubled; Mongolia was the last country to ratify the Convention yesterday, thus becoming the 45th State party. The ratification in itself was not the objective, stressed Mr. Decaux; the priority was to turn the texts into reality. The primary mechanism to do so was the consideration of State party reports. So far, the Committee had reviewed the situation in a dozen States, including criminal legislation, protection of victims, and general dispositions to ensure the right to justice, the right to truth, the right to reparation and the right to non-repetition.
The Convention also contained very precise provisions in matters of early warning, with internal safeguards incumbent to States, but also with a kind of international habeas corpus thanks to Article 30 that allowed urgent calls to find a missing person as soon as possible. Since the entry into force of the Convention, 61 requests for urgent action had been registered; unfortunately, the procedure on urgent action was not yet widely known, and the State’s response needed to be faster and more efficient. The Chairperson stressed that Article 31 on individual communication and Article 32 on state communications were not an attack on national sovereignty, but were legal guarantees of the effectiveness of the commitments made by States parties. Mr. Decaux announced that, after a scrupulous examination, the Committee had just declared admissible the first communication submitted on the basis of Article 31.
Committee Chairperson underlined the importance of the first five articles of the Convention, which obliged States to put in place an appropriate legal framework to protect persons from enforced disappearances, and to ensure that the crime of enforced disappearances was qualified as crime against humanity in case of generalized or systematic practice. States which did not criminalize enforced disappearances failed to fulfil their obligations under the Convention.
Taking stock of the previous four years, the Chairperson said that the Committee had been able to work in a collegial fashion and take decisions by consensus. Reports from a whole series of very diverse States had been considered, thus deepening the knowledge and understanding of the Convention, which was evident in the important work of its interpretation. The Committee had clarified the temporal scope of its competences and obligations under the Convention and had been more specific about territorial applications of the State’s obligations under the Convention. Further, the Committee had filled in an apparent gap with its statement on the question of military jurisdictions. When the time came, it would probably develop a general comment on the scope of article 3 of the Convention and the involvement of non - state actors, in line with internal reflections already begun and consultations with the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The concluding observations for Armenia, Mexico and Serbia will be made available on the Committee’s webpage for this session, where the session report, statements and other documents related to the seventh session can also be found.
The ninth session of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances will be held in Geneva from 7 to 18 September 2015, during which the reports of Iraq and Montenegro will be considered.
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CED15/007E