Поділіться
[:en]The Hague, 16 June 2023: The sinking of an overcrowded fishing boat on 14 June off the coast of Greece, resulting in multiple deaths and disappearances, will require a major international effort to account for hundreds of missing persons, Kathryne Bomberger, the Director-General of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) said today.
ICMP has already offered to assist the Greek authorities in locating and identifying the missing, “but this will be an international effort – a large number of those who were aboard the vessel were Syrian, but there were many other nationalities too. Under international law, governments have interconnected obligations to investigate disappearances and repatriate human remains.”
ICMP has offered to send teams to Athens to collect reference samples from relatives of the missing, which can be compared with DNA profiles extracted from unidentified human remains. This will significantly facilitate efforts to identify victims of the tragedy.
On Friday afternoon, Ms Bomberger and ICMP colleagues spoke to a Syrian survivor of the fatal sinking. “We will take steps to invite family members and survivors to upload information about those who were aboard the vessel to ICMP’s Online Inquiry Center,” Ms Bomberger said. “It is essential at this stage to collect as much relevant information as possible, so that identifications can be made later on.”
According to IOM, Europe has the highest number of dead and missing migrants in the world. Since 2018, ICMP has been working with the Greek government, and with the governments of Cyprus, Italy and Malta to develop a Joint Process to account for missing persons in the Mediterranean. In November 2021 at the third meeting of the Joint Process in Athens, Greece expressed support for the initiative, which “complements our national efforts for the identification of missing persons.”
After the first meeting of the Joint Process, in Rome, ICMP conducted a comprehensive assessment and presented a set of Proposals for Action at the second meeting, held in June 2019 at ICMP Headquarters in The Hague. At that meeting, Cyprus, Greece, and Malta welcomed “the initiative to further explore cooperation, including identifying ‘focal points’ in each country.” In 2020 and 2021, focal points were appointed, representing a significant step forward in operational cooperation.
“At the third meeting, in November 2021 in Athens, it was clear to all the participating countries that a secure system for sharing data about missing migrants needs to be developed,” Ms Bomberger said. “This can be done in a way that makes better use of existing resources, and it would help governments to meet their obligations. Governments are obliged to conduct serious investigations into disappearances – including the disappearance of people who are not citizens – and to make arrangement, where possible, for human remains to be repatriated to families in the country of origin for burial.”
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, irregular migration and other causes and to assist them in doing so. It is the only international organization tasked exclusively to work on the issue of missing persons.
[:]
