disappearance

At the end of October another crack was opened in the wall of impunity: there was a further conviction for forced disappearance. That is the third success for justice, along with the El Jute and Choatalum  cases. The bare facts of the case are that student leader Edgar Fernando García was disappeared on 18 February 1984 and was never seen again. The whereabouts of his remains are still unknown, as the two police officers convicted have not revealed them. The police officers have been sentenced to forty years each in prison.

It is rare that Guatemala gets any attention in the chambers of Westminster, so I was pleased to see that a parliamentary question has been asked about it recently. During the fourteenth session of the UN Human Rights Council a motion was passed relating to enforced disappearances, interestingly one of its sponsors is Guatemala. The motion calls on states, among other things, to "continue their efforts to elucidate the fate of disappeared persons".

The recent arrest and appearance of Radovan Karadzic in front of the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has focussed attention again on a bitter, and recent, historical period in Europe. There have been plenty of articles in the media exploring what the arrest means for the future of Bosnia and journalists have been visiting Srebrenica to interview those who survived the war, asking how they manage to live with what they suffered. Questions are being asked about how he managed to evade capture for so long, even though he was living in Belgrade. What pressure was applied that finally made the difference so that one of Europe’s two most wanted men was handed in?