Responsibility for forced disappearance in the criminal legislation of foreign countries (through the prism of the provisions of international agreements)

Abstract

Enforced disappearance is a flagrant violation of the guaranteed and fundamental rights and freedoms that a person possesses. The practice of using enforced disappearances is not new, and therefore the need for proper and effective regulation aimed at preventing, guarding and protecting persons from enforced disappearances is socially demanded. The normative embodiment of states' desire to protect people from such encroachments is a number of international legal documents at the interstate level, while measures aimed at the implementation of relevant international legal norms are carried out at the level of a specific state.
 Therefore, the purpose of this article is to analyze the criminal legal norms of individual states in terms of responsibility for enforced disappearance, to assess the compliance of such national criminal legislation with international standards for combating enforced disappearances.
 The article examined the criminal laws of such countries as the Republic of Armenia, Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Croatia, the Republic of Serbia, the Republic of Montenegro, the Republic of Turkey, the Kingdom of Spain, Romania, and the United States of America. The analysis was based on the standards defining the crime of enforced disappearance, which are set forth in the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
 According to the results of the conducted research, it was established that most of the states do not provide protection against enforced disappearances from the criminal law. Those states that did enshrine enforced disappearance as a crime did so in the following forms: transfer into legislation with preservation of all features, enshrining the crime without disclosing its features, partial enshrining with a change in composition.