Committee on Enforced Disappearances
Sixteenth session
Summary record ( p artial )* of the 276th meeting
Held at the Palais Wilson, Geneva, on Monday, 8 April 2019, at 10 a.m.
Chair:Ms. Janina
Contents
Opening of the session
Adoption of the agenda
Minute of silence in remembrance of victims of enforced disappearance
The meeting was called to order at 10 a.m.
Opening of the session
1.The Chair declared open the sixteenth session of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances.
Statement by the representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
2.Ms. Andrijasevic-Boko (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)) said that there had been a number of developments over recent months with respect to the prevention and elimination of enforced disappearance. The Human Rights Committee had adopted a general comment (CCPR/C/GC/36) stating that enforced disappearance represented a grave threat to the right to life and detailing States’ obligations to prevent and investigate all cases of enforced disappearance, bring perpetrators to justice and provide full reparation to victims. It underlined that families of victims of enforced disappearance should not, in any circumstances, be obliged to declare them dead in order to be eligible for reparation.
3.The General Assembly had adopted resolution 73/178 on missing persons, in which it encouraged States to sign, ratify or accede to the Convention and to consider the option provided for in articles 31 and 32 to recognize the Committee’s competence to receive individual and inter-State communications. In addition, Mexico, during its universal periodic review, had accepted recommendations on enforced disappearance, including on those articles.
4.The annual meeting of Chairs of the human rights treaty bodies in June 2019 would be the last such formal meeting before the 2020 review of the treaty body system. It was therefore crucial that the Committee should take time to reflect on any further contributions it wished to make to the review.
5.The third biennial report of the Secretary-General on the status of the treaty body system would be submitted to the General Assembly in January 2020; the Office had extended to 30 April 2019 the deadline for the submission of input to the report. It would highlight lessons learned and address procedures and activities that had not been adequately funded, including those pertaining to individual complaints and requests for urgent action.
6.Collaboration between rapporteurs, the secretariat and the OHCHR field presences remained paramount in handling requests for urgent action; so far, the Committee had registered 569 requests, as a result of which 41 persons had been localized. While the figures were impressive, they were still low compared to the number of victims of enforced disappearances in the world.
7.The Committee would be continuing its work on the draft guiding principles for the search for disappeared persons. The more than 40 written contributions received during the open consultation process from stakeholders, including organizations of victims, national human rights institutions and States parties to the Convention, highlighted the importance of that work.
Adoption of the agenda
8.The provisional agenda (CED/C/16/1) was adopted.
Minute of silence in remembrance of victims of enforced disappearance
9. At the invitation of the Chair, the members of the Committee observed a minute of silence in remembrance of victims of enforced disappearance.
The discussion covered in the summary record ended at 10.15 a.m.