Committee on Enforced Disappearances concludes its sixteenth sessions
ROUNDUP
Adopts Concluding Observations on the Reports of Chile, Italy and Peru, and the Guiding Principles for the Search for Disappeared Persons
GENEVA (18 April 2019) - The Committee on Enforced Disappearances this afternoon closed its sixteenth session after adopting its concluding observations and recommendations on the reports of Chile, Italy and Peru on their implementation of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. The Committee also adopted its Guiding Principles for the Search for Disappeared Persons.
Koji Teraya, Committee Rapporteur, said that in the course of its sixteenth session that had started on 8 April, the Committee had adopted concluding observations on reports of Italy, Peru and Chile, and the list of issues on the reports of Bolivia (Plurinational State of) and Slovakia, whose reports would be reviewed at the Committee’s seventeenth session. The Committee had decided to postpone the adoption of the list of issues in the absence of a report for Nigeria, also due to be reviewed at the seventeenth session. The Committee had adopted the follow-up report on urgent actions and the guidelines on preparing a list of issues in the absence of a report, and had decided to send reminder letters to Mali, Brazil and Iraq, and to request Argentina to hold a substantive dialogue on the implementation of the Convention during the meeting of States parties in New York in June 2019.
As for the 2020 treaty body review process, the Rapporteur said that the Committee had decided to convey its position to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and to request the Secretary-General to reflect all the Committee’s activities in his forthcoming report on the implementation of the 68/268 resolution to the General Assembly. The Committee reiterated its request to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to implement the fifth week of meetings allocated to it by the General Assembly and adopted a provisional agenda for the seventeenth session.
. . .
In 2016, the Committee had issued its first view on an individual communication in the case of Yrusta vs. Argentina, in which the Committee had confirmed that short term disappearance could not be justified and that placing a person outside of the reach of the law, even for short periods of time, amounted to enforced disappearance. The Committee, the Chair continued, was not an isolated island in the battle against enforced disappearances and had enjoyed the support of States parties as demonstrated by the positive outcome of the first conference of the States parties to the Convention, which had reaffirmed that the Committee was indeed the monitoring body for the implementation of the Convention.
More:
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24504&LangID=E
