Delite
The Hague, 26 July 2024: – On the occasion of Martyr’s Day in Vietnam, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) renews its commitment to work with the Vietnamese authorities on developing a DNA-led missing persons process to locate and identify a large number of people who went missing during the 1945-75 conflict.
In April 2024, the Institute of Biotechnology-Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (IBT-VAST), in coordination with ICMP, launched an ODA project to improve Vietnam’s capacity to identify human remains from the war. The two-year project is supported with funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Working with USAID and VAST since 2020, ICMP has already been able to assist in developing an effective DNA-led missing persons process in Vietnam. In a pilot project launched in 2023, ICMP and the IBT’s Center for DNA Identification (CDI) jointly selected 100 bone samples, which were brought to ICMP’s laboratories in the Netherlands for testing. CDI staff visited ICMP’s Headquarters in The Hague for multi-week training in DNA extraction methods, and ICMP provided the CDI with instruments to enable DNA extraction and DNA quality assessment. A very high proportion of the bone samples that have been processed under this project have generated a DNA profile with enough identification power that could result in an identification if compared with even a distant relative of the person from whose unidentified remains the bone sample was taken. This will make it possible to support the identification of decades-old remains, even those that have been degraded by exposure to Vietnam’s climate, and it will be possible to use reference samples from people living in Vietnam today to identify the remains of their great-great-grandparents.
Under the project that began in April, ICMP will help IBT-VAST to develop advanced DNA extraction methods and Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology to extract DNA profiles from highly degraded bone samples in Vietnam. This will be supported by data analysis tools, with the goal of establishing an automated system to process a large number of samples.
The cooperation between ICMP scientists and their colleagues in Vietnam could help to achieve the Vietnamese Government’s goal of identifying more than 300,000 sets of human remains from war.
About ICMP
ICMP is a treaty-based intergovernmental organization with Headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands. Its mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and others in locating missing persons from conflict, human rights abuses, disasters, organized crime, migration and other causes and to assist them in doing so.
