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The Hague, 14 November 2024 – The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) convened the Fourth Intergovernmental Roundtable, titled “Accounting for the Missing is an Investment in Peace and Stability,” today at the House of Europe in The Hague, the Netherlands. The event, convened under Chatham House rules, gathered prominent government representatives from the Middle East and North Africa region and Europe to discuss shared strategies to support efforts to find missing persons from the Syrian conflict and the continuing crisis.
The scale of the numbers in Syria alone is huge, with as many as 157,000 individuals estimated as missing from repression and conflict, as well as from natural disasters and migration-related incidents. Countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq host significant numbers of Syrian refugees, with additional refugee populations in European countries such as Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Welcoming conference participants, ICMP Commissioner Alistair Burt emphasized the importance of identifying missing persons as a cornerstone for peace and stability in Syria and the region.
“Today’s roundtable meeting explored practical ways of advancing cooperation among states in the Middle East and Europe that can enhance efforts to locate missing persons among populations of refugees, migrants and displaced persons whose relatives have gone missing in their country of origin or along migratory routes,” Burt noted. The Roundtable defined shared challenges across Europe and the Middle East and reviewed relevant legal frameworks for cases of missing migrants and displaced persons.
Ann Snow, UK Special Representative to Syria at the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, noted, “This is an important and timely roundtable. Addressing the fate of missing persons in Syria matters for families and it matters as a foundation for any sustainable future peace.”
Participants discussed the role of centralized data systems, and the need to increase awareness of the issue among policymakers and the public, as well as ways in which governments can increase cooperation quickly and effectively.
Participants also examined the responsibilities of states to locate missing persons, stressing the need for coordinated international efforts to address the issue.
Among other things, participants discussed leveraging ICMP’s Integrated Data Management System (iDMS) as an impartial, centralized tool.
The meeting included a briefing on a proposed regional dialogue for the Middle East to enhance cooperation on the missing persons crisis, which will take place next year in Iraq.
ICMP is working with families of the missing and governments to lay the foundations for an effective system to find missing Syrians. It has collected data from more than 76,000 families of the missing who have reported more than 28,000 missing persons cases related to the Syrian context. ICMP has also received reports concerning the location of 66 sites of mass graves in addition to two detention sites, through ICMP’s Online Inquiry Center (OIC) Site Locator.
The roundtable was supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, a key partner in ICMP’s Syria Program.
About ICMP
ICMP is a treaty-based intergovernmental organization that seeks to ensure 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. ICMP also supports the work of other organizations in their efforts, encourages public involvement in its activities and contributes to the development of appropriate expressions of commemoration and tribute to the missing.
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