On August 30, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the Memory Project team and Verstka will host their annual international online conference.

Enforced disappearance remains a pressing international issue. According to the UN, more than 10,000 people are subjected to enforced disappearance every year. The International Committee of the Red Cross reports that by the end of 2023, 239,700 people were registered as missing worldwide. Enforced disappearance typically involves abduction, torture, ill-treatment, and in many cases, the death of the victim. This crime inflicts suffering not only on the abducted person but also on their relatives. They spend years not knowing whether their loved one is alive or dead.

During the war in Chechnya, Russian state agents abducted several thousand people, and to this date, their families still have no information about their fate. The Memory project shed light on this issue in its five-minute film ‘Neither Living nor Dead’, which was awarded Best Short Animated Film at the Montreal Women’s Film Festival.

The 2025 event will focus on justice, accountability, documentation, and preserving the memory of the disappeared. This year, we will discuss how this issue affects the North Caucasus, other regions of Russia, Ukraine, and Syria, and examine why uncovering the truth and ensuring accountability are so crucial.

The event will be hosted by journalist Maksim Kurnikov.

Speakers:

Bill Bowring – Honorary President of the European Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights (ELDH).
Aleksandr Cherkasov – Board member of the Human Rights Center ‘Memorial,’ laureate of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.
Grigor Avetisyan – lawyer working with victims of enforced disappearance in the North Caucasus.
Lyudmila Siryk – mother of the missing Ukrainian citizen Snezhana Kozlova.
Kholoud Helmi – a Syrian journalist, human rights defender, and co-founder of Enab Baladi.
Izzadin Saleh – a Syrian researcher and human rights defender, co-founder and executive director of the Synergy Association for Victims, founded in 2021.
The online conference will be streamed on 30 August at 2pm MSK / 1pm CET at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O6VmLxND-w

As stated in the UN General Assembly’s Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (Resolution 47/133, 18 December 1992):

Any act of enforced disappearance is an offence to human dignity. It is condemned as a denial of the purposes of the Charter of the United Nations and as a grave and flagrant violation of the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and reaffirmed and developed in international instruments in this field. (Article 1)
No State shall practise, permit or tolerate enforced disappearances. (Article 2)
States shall act at the national and regional levels and in cooperation with the United Nations to contribute by all means to the prevention and eradication of enforced disappearance. (Article 2)
No circumstances whatsoever, whether a threat of war, a state of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked to justify enforced disappearances. (Article 7)
No order or instruction of any public authority, civilian, military or other, may be invoked to justify an enforced disappearance. Any person receiving such an order or instruction shall have the right and duty not to obey it. (Article 6)
The Memory Project is an initiative led by a team of lawyers and researchers committed to investigating and preserving the memory of grave human rights violations in the North Caucasus during the armed conflict of 1994–2009, and seeks to ensure accountability for perpetrators. The project draws on publicly available data from human rights organizations and on its own research.