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Russias Efforts to Block the Draft Convention
on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances
In 2001 the U.N. Commission on Human Rights established an
intersessional open-ended working group to elaborate a draft legally binding
instrument for the protection of all persons from enforced disappearances. This
was the culmination of a process started by the international community as
long ago as the late 1980s, in an effort to find the legal means to help
eradicate the scourge of disappearances that had ravaged societies in all regions of the world. Since then the Working Group has been holding two sessions per year and
making substantial progress towards the completion of this treaty. The current text
contains important protections as well as innovative mechanisms for the
prevention of disappearances.
While initially mildly supportive of the initiative, Russia has become
increasingly hostile to the idea of an international treaty aimed at preventing
enforced disappearances. During the last session of the Working Group, Russia insisted that the definition of disappearances should include private actors as
perpetrators on the same footing as governments. The Russian proposal would
represent a fundamental departure from the principles of international human
rights law, which imposes certain legal obligations on states to ensure that
the rights of individuals are protected and prohibits states from engaging in
activities that would violate those rights. The particular horror of disappearances
is that they are a mechanism used by state agents to bypass their own legal
institutions and obligations when they find these obligations inconvenient.
The terrifying abuses committed by the Chechen rebels deserve the most
energetic condemnation, but it is clear from this report that the
responsibility for enforced disappearances in Chechnya lies mainly with the
Russian government. Attempts to disguise such crimes as rebel abuses are
reprehensible; parallel efforts to distort the measures aimed at providing
legal protection and remedy for such crimes further undermines both the moral
and legal authority of the government.
Unfortunately a number of proposals aimed at compromise, and at accommodating Russia's concerns, have led nowhere. Beyond this specific issue Russia has not engaged in
substantive debate on the provisions of the draft treaty. At the same time it
has become one of the major obstacles to the completion of the treaty through
the systematic introduction of procedural issues aimed at delaying and
derailing the debate.