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The Hague, 29 June 2026 – The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) was established at the G7 Summit in Lyon on 29 June 1996, guided by a simple but enduring principle: accounting for the missing is an investment in peace. For three decades, ICMP has helped states attempt to fulfill their responsibility to account for missing persons while securing the rights of families to truth, justice, and reparations. In doing so, it has demonstrated that accounting for the missing is fundamental to reconciliation, the rule of law, and resilient societies.
When ICMP was founded, there was hope that the international community would enter a more stable era. Instead, the world has become increasingly marked by armed conflict, political instability, disasters, irregular migration, and overlapping humanitarian crises. Today, millions of families continue to search for missing loved ones, underscoring a simple truth: societies are stronger when states meet their responsibility to account for the missing.
Over the past 30 years, ICMP has transformed how large-scale missing persons cases are addressed. Originally mandated to help account for approximately 40,000 people who disappeared during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, it pioneered the use of DNA-based identification, developed integrated data systems, strengthened legal and institutional frameworks, and helped governments achieve unprecedented results. Today more than 75 percent of the missing in the Western Balkans have been accounted for.
Building on this experience, ICMP has evolved into a treaty-based international organization with a global mandate, helping governments across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, Asia, and Latin America to address disappearances resulting from conflict, human rights violations, organized crime, migration, disasters, and other causes.
ICMP has demonstrated that science, effective institutions, and international cooperation can deliver answers even in the most complex circumstances. It has also championed the transformative role of women in advancing truth, justice, and accountability. Across regions, women – particularly families of the missing – have transformed grief into leadership, becoming advocates, scientists, lawyers, policymakers, and community leaders whose efforts have strengthened democratic institutions, advanced more inclusive peacebuilding, and inspired lasting societal change.
Responding effectively to large-scale missing persons crises that are becoming more frequent and more complex requires not only proven expertise but also the ability to mobilize this expertise rapidly. Over the past three decades, ICMP has built precisely this capability. Through its Standing Capacity for Crisis Response (SCCR), ICMP is ensuring that its internationally recognized expertise, technologies, and operational capacities remain in a constant state of readiness to support governments whenever and wherever large-scale missing persons crises occur. By supporting the SCCR, partners are sustaining an established global capability that enables governments to prepare for, respond to, and recover from future crises.
Thirty years after its establishment, ICMP’s founding principle remains unchanged: accounting for the missing is an investment in peace. Together with its States Parties, partner governments, international partner organizations, civil society, and family associations, ICMP will continue to support families of the missing, strengthen societies through truth, justice, and state accountability, and help governments fulfill their responsibility to account for the missing.
ICMP’s legacy lies not only in what it has achieved over the past 30 years, but in the enduring international framework it has helped to build for the decades ahead, a framework that places families at its center, reinforces the responsibility of states, harnesses science in the service of justice, and affirms that accounting for the missing is an indispensable investment in peace.
