Working Paper Caring for the Missing: Forensic, Humanitarian and Judicial Responses to Disappearance and Enforced Disappearancee

Abstract

Enforced disappearance in Latin America is simultaneously an ongoing reality; an emblematic crime of past authoritarian regimes, and a significant component of the human toll of internal armed conflict in some Central American and Andean countries. Recent accountability developments in Latin America and beyond have called on forensic science to trace, unearth and restore the remains of the disappeared: as part of a judicial process, or as a humanitarian imperative in its own right. Some consider that a distinctive Latin American approach to forensic work as human rights work has emerged, with experts from the region increasingly called upon to assist international tribunals or perform exhumations of mass graves. Technical-scientific forensic interventions are however only part of the story. Efforts to bring perpetrators to justice require exploration of the intersection between international legal norms, regional human rights systems, and domestic criminal justice. This working paper collates and synthesises the results of three events stimulating dialogue between law, social science and forensic (natural) sciences around the issue of disappearance and enforced disappearance in contexts of past political violence. This dialogue, focused principally on Latin American experiences, took the form of two workshops and a set of academic panels carried out in January and April 2017, in Santiago de Chile and Lima, Peru.