Compartir
The Hague, 30 August 2025: The Head of Syria’s newly-established National Commission for Missing Persons (NCMP), Mohammad Reda Jalkhi and the Director-General of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), Kathryne Bomberger, issued the following joint statement today, marking International Day of the Disappeared.
Around the world, governments and organizations are joining families of the missing to mark International Day of the Disappeared. This year, for the first time, families in Syria are publicly observing this day, and they are doing so with the support of the Syrian government.
Syria faces a daunting task. The number of people missing from decades of conflict and repression is likely to be above 150,000 and could be much more. We know it will be hard, but we believe, with political and popular support, many of these people can be accounted for. We know, too, that Syria will not recover from its national tragedy unless this issue is addressed.
In the last quarter of a century, countries have developed effective strategies to locate and identify the missing. They have engaged civil society as a whole to sustain long-term programs that work on the basis of mass participation and that are supported by dedicated laws.
Arab countries, as well as countries in Latin America, including Chile, Argentina, Mexico and Colombia, in the Western Balkans, and in Asia, including Sri Lanka, Nepal and Vietnam, have set up dedicated missing persons institutions with sufficient resources to carry out the complex tasks assigned to them. On 17 May 2025, Syria’s National Commission for the Missing was established by Presidential decree, and it has now begun its work.
Two elements are essential to a successful missing persons process: governments must understand their obligations, and families of the missing must understand their rights. The Government of Syria does understand its obligations. It is formally and publicly committed to accounting for the missing, whatever their communal or political affiliation may have been, whatever their ethnicity or the circumstances of their disappearance. And it understands that this is not simply a political option but a requirement under law.
In November 2018 at the Paris Peace Forum, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), together with the European Union, unveiled eight principles that underpin the global effort to account for the missing. The first of the Paris Principles is that the failure to investigate the fate and whereabouts of missing persons in an effective way, including the circumstances of their disappearance, can constitute a continuing breach of fundamental human rights of both the missing persons and their family members.
The NCMP seeks to ground its work in six guiding principles: transparency, by publishing material updates on progress and spending while safeguarding privacy; participation, by involving families in setting priorities and decisions; inclusivity, by searching for all missing persons across the Syrian Arab Republic without discrimination; complementarity, by coordinating with civil-society and international partners under clear national leadership that avoids duplication and protects data; realism, by managing expectations through time-bound plans and measurable indicators; and professional rigor, by applying internationally recognized standards and procedures while investing in sustained capacity-building.
A swathe of legal instruments underpin States’ obligations to conduct effective investigations. The right to life in particular rests on the procedural guarantee that possible abuses will be officially investigated. This means that families of the missing have the right to full and effective investigations. The NCMP will work with families to ensure that they understand this right and that they are able to exercise it. This approach is further embedded in practice by including victims’ families in half of the NCMP’s advisory team, reflecting a firm conviction that the Commission and the families are one team sharing responsibility and shaping decisions together.
The issue of missing-persons is weighed down by a long legacy of enforced disappearances and undocumented, brutal executions carried out by the Assad regime, leaving a legacy of mass graves, degraded biological evidence, and the destruction of intelligence-service files that may have contained evidence of killings. Added to this burden is the challenge of building specialized national capacities that will uncover the truth and uphold the dignity of the victims and their families.
Work has already taken place to prepare an effective missing persons process that is embedded in the rule of law. Syrian organizations and international organizations hold information on tens of thousands of individual cases and have drawn up legislative proposals that can further support a long-term missing persons process. Excavating hundreds of mass graves as part of judicial investigations and identifying the remains of victims using DNA will open the way to truth and justice.
In this context, the NCMP has signed a protocol with the Syrian Ministry of Interior to secure and safeguard mass-grave sites against any tampering until the remains can be exhumed under the NCMP’s scientific and methodical supervision.
Under equally challenging conditions, other countries have emerged from national trauma and begun the process of accounting for the disappeared. They have been successful. We believe that Syria, too, can succeed in this difficult but absolutely necessary task. This year, the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina will mark its 20th anniversary. It is the oldest such institution in the world and it has a record of tangible achievement. Syria’s National Commission for the Missing is the newest such agency, and, like comparable institutions in other countries, it will endeavor to secure concrete progress through constructive collaboration with stakeholders and a commitment to the rights of families and the rule of law.
