The International Day of the Disappeared on August 30 is an annual commemoration day to draw attention to the fate of people who are kept imprisoned at a place and under conditions unknown to their relatives and legal representatives. The idea for this commemoration day came from the Federación Latinoamericana de Asociaciones de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos (FEDEFAM), a non-governmental organization which was founded in 1981 in Costa Rica as an association of local and regional groups active against secret imprisonment in a number of Latin-American countries.
Working for people affected by secret imprisonment is an important part of the activities for a number of international bodies and organizations in the fields of human rights activism and humanitarian aid, including for example amnesty international, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). For these institutions, the International Day of the Disappeared is an opportunity to highlight their work, increase public awareness and to call for support by volunteers and donations.
Among those institutions, the ICRC has far-reaching privileges due to its special situation as a non-governmental sovereign entity and its strict policy of neutrality. In some cases, the ICRC is the only institution to be granted access to specific groups of prisoners which enables a minimum level of contact to these prisoners and inspection of their treatment. As a consequence, an end to the uncertainty about their location and their situation is possible in some cases. For affected families, messages transmitted by the ICRC are often the first and only hint about the fate of these prisoners.
Imprisonment under secret or uncertain circumstances for the relatives is a grave violation of Human rights as well as, in the case of an armed conflict, of International Humanitarian Law. The General Assemby of the United Nations has adopted a „Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance“ as its resolution 47/133 on December 18, 1992. It is estimated that secret imprisonment is practiced in about 30 countries. The OHCHR Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances has registered about 46,000 cases of people who disappeared under unknown circumstances.
