BIRN BiH in Publication on Global Missing Persons Initiative

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A publication of the International Commission on Missing Persons, ICMP, has quoted the director of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Anisa Suceska Vekic, on global challenges in the search for missing persons.

The publication, entitled “The Missing – An Agenda for the Future”, quotes Suceska-Vekic in several places as a participant in an expert debate held in 2013 in Sarajevo, which discussed lessons learned in Bosnia and Herzegovina that can be applied across the world.

“More than 70% of missing persons have been accounted for thanks to the cooperation of the international community, domestic authorities, the prosecutor’s offices and civil society in a scenario that is unique, and the process took place within a legal framework to support families of the missing,” it quoted Suceska-Vekic as having said.

“In the last decade in the UK and USA millions of children disappear annually, and in Brazil some 40,000 children disappear annually due to drug use and trafficking. In India, 35,000 children have been found dead,” she added.

“They too were victims of human trafficking. We do not have the right not to help them because the problem is essentially the same. The role of government is the same, […] and there is the same need of the families to find their relatives, and the same need for international standards.” 

The ICMP hosted a global conference last year to discuss a set of issues that will help define an agenda for the future of the missing persons issue, based on the experience of the missing persons process in the Western Balkans.

You can download the publication on this link: http://www.ic-mp.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/icmp-conference-report.pdf