The “Peace Formula Philosophy” that Ukraine has proposed for discussion at the international conference in Switzerland this weekend (15 and 16 June) includes provisions on the release of prisoners and deportees, and accountability for “serious crimes under international law” through “appropriate, fair and independent investigations and prosecutions.”
Accounting for victims of incommunicado detention or enforced disappearance and bringing perpetrators to justice are indispensable in upholding the rule of law and forging a truthful historical narrative that will not be manipulated or exploited for political advantage.
Since 2014, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has helped Ukraine to build a system that can reliably account for large numbers of missing persons. The authorities have committed themselves – in the middle of a war – to a strategy that is predicated on delivering truth and justice to victims.
In addition to captured and missing military personnel, the authorities are compiling a comprehensive record of civilians who have disappeared in occupied territory, including children deported to Russia. The numbers range from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
Faced with this volume of missing persons it is not sufficient to rely on peacetime provisions that are customarily vested in the criminal justice system.
However, a range of strategies have been developed over the last 25 years. In a DNA-led process, genetic reference samples are taken from hundreds of thousands of relatives, and DNA extracted from these samples is compared with DNA taken from unidentified human remains or from living people – children, for example – who are unable to identify themselves.
ICMP pioneered this approach in the former Yugoslavia, where it helped the authorities identify more than three-quarters of the 40,000 people missing from the conflicts of the 1990s, including more than 7,000 of the 8,000 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide.
The painstaking, science-based process of identifying thousands of victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina and documenting evidence in a disciplined juridical process made it possible to establish an irrefutable historical record and deliver a measure of justice to victims through domestic and international courts.
ICMP has already piloted a joint programme with Ukraine’s ministry of internal affairs to collect samples from families in Ukraine and in countries where large numbers of Ukrainians have sought refuge. ICMP is also helping to train Ukrainian forensic experts in the protocols required to process large numbers of unidentified remains to a standard where the evidence that has been collected can be presented in court.
Settlements that have ended conflicts in other parts of the world have included legislative and institutional provisions to account for the missing. Colombia’s 2016 peace accords, for example, established a Search Unit for Missing Persons (UBPD) and tasked ICMP with supporting the work of the UBPD.
In Kyiv at the end of May, ICMP brought together relevant Ukrainian government institutions and civil society representatives to examine the institutional and legislative provisions that will be required to sustain an effective missing persons process over the long term.
A roundtable of Ukrainian and international forensic experts organised by ICMP in Warsaw from 11-13 June built on this discussion, and the process will continue at ICMP headquarters in The Hague next Wednesday (19 June), where roundtable participants will look specifically at the issue of how to locate and identify Ukrainian children who have been deported to Russia.
Until now, this dialogue has engaged Ukrainian stakeholders.
Yet the families of Russian military personnel missing in Ukraine are also demanding to know the fate of their loved ones. The Russian authorities have an obligation to account for the missing and an interest in cooperating with the Ukrainian side in order to do this.
The Ukrainian authorities have rightly placed this issue at the centre of efforts to restore peace. Lasting peace must be based on truth and justice – and these will only be secured if systematic steps are taken to account for those who have gone missing as a result of the conflict.
Kathryne Bomberger is director general of the International Committee on Missing Persons, a treaty-based intergovernmental organization with headquarters in The Hague. ICMP’s mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and other authorities in locating persons missing as a result of conflicts, human rights abuses, disasters, organized violence and other causes and to assist them in doing so. ICMP’s Ukraine programme is supported by the European Union and the governments of Canada, Germany, Norway, and the US.
Kathryne Bomberger is director general of the International Committee on Missing Persons, a treaty-based intergovernmental organization with headquarters in The Hague. ICMP’s mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and other authorities in locating persons missing as a result of conflicts, human rights abuses, disasters, organized violence and other causes and to assist them in doing so. ICMP’s Ukraine programme is supported by the European Union and the governments of Canada, Germany, Norway, and the US.