New treaty against enforced disappearances: UN

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 21: A new international treaty banning nations from abducting perceived enemies and hiding them in secret prisons or killing them was adopted by the UN General Assembly yesterday.

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance was approved by the 192-nation assembly by consensus and will be open to signing by governments at a February. 6 ceremony in Paris.

Enforced disappearances occur around the world and the treaty will help prevent future disappearances and bring future perpetrators to justice, said assembly President Haya Rashed Al Khalifa of Bahrain.

Since 1980 there have been more than 51,000 enforced disappearances in more than 90 countries, she said.

The United Nations received reports of about 535 new disappearances last year alone, many of them in Chechnya, Colombia, and Nepal.

The treaty has been under negotiation since 1992, inspired by disappearances and killings of government opponents during Latin American military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.

''The notion of the 'disappeared person' is one of the most horrific facts of the 20th century,'' Argentina's UN ambassador, Cesar Mayoral, told the assembly.

''For Argentina it has a particularly sad significance since in the '70s the military dictatorship carried out this abhorrent practice in a systematic way,'' he said.

Officially, some 12,000 people were killed or disappeared during Argentina's 1976-1983 Dirty War, a witch hunt for leftists carried out by the country's dictatorship. Rights groups put the number at 30,000.

The convention, which will come into force 30 days after its ratification by 20 countries, recognizes the right of all people to be safe from enforced disappearance and says victims and their relatives have the right to justice and reparations.

It offers a first definition of disappearance in international law, calling it detention, abduction, or deprivation of liberty by state agents followed by a refusal to acknowledge deprivation and a placing of those who have disappeared outside the protection of the law.

It calls enforced disappearance a criminal act that cannot be justified, and says perpetrators must be sought out and brought to justice.

It requires governments to outlaw secret detention and undeclared detention facilities, and establishes the right of families to learn the fate and whereabouts of relatives who have been detained.

It also creates a committee to monitor the treaty's implementation and to review individuals' complaints of disappearances that governments have not acknowledged.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Federation for Human Rights, and Amnesty International welcomed the convention's approval and called on all governments to quickly ratify the pact.

The United States, accused of ''renditions'' in which terrorism suspects were transferred to secret jails in other countries, did not address the assembly but rights experts said they did not expect Washington to ratify the pact.

REUTERS