27 September 2013: At a three-day networking conference in Erbil more than 50 Iraqi women whose family members were forcibly disappeared reaffirmed their wish to establish and officially register “The Arc of Life” network as a mechanism to better lobby for their rights.

The conference, organized by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), in cooperation with Martyrs Foundation and Ministry of Martyrs and Anfal affairs, brought together more than 50 Iraqi Kurdish and Iraqi Arab women whose family members are missing in Iraq.

25 September 2013: The Head of the Delegation of the European Union to Bosnia and Herzegovina/EU Special Representative, Ambassador Peter Sørensen, together with the EUFOR Commander, Major General Dieter Heidecker, and senior diplomats accredited to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) visited two major excavation sites in Sarajevo and Prijedor today. During this visit they were briefed about the results of the work so far and reiterated their support for this important process.

12 September 2013: The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is honored to announce that H.E. Mr. Knut Vollebæk has joined ICMP as a commissioner. Mr. Vollebæk is a distinguished Norwegian diplomat and politician.

From 2007 to 2013, Mr. Vollebæk served as the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities. Prior to that, he served as Ambassador to the United States between 2001 and 2007 and Norway’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1997 to 2000. He was Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE in 1999. Mr. Vollebæk’s diplomatic career includes assignments to New Delhi, Madrid and Harare. He was Norwegian Ambassador to Costa Rica in 1991-1993.

6 September: The Chairman of the newly established British charity “Remembering Srebrenica” Dr. Waqar Azmi OBE visited the headquarters of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) in Sarajevo to discuss how to incorporate ICMP’s approach to addressing the issue of persons missing from armed conflict and human rights abuses into his initiative, “Lessons from Srebrenica”.

2 September 2013: Following the derailment of a train that happened in Lac Mégantic, in the Canadian province of Quebec, on July 6th, 2013, the Quebec authorities have reached out to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) for assistance in their disaster victim identification efforts. The Lac-Mégantic accident was the fourth deadliest rail accident in Canadian history that took more than 40 lives.