Kevin Sullivan assesses the prospects for settling long-running conflicts in the Philippines in the context of continuing human rights violations, including enforced disappearances

The announcement at the end of August that the Philippines Government and the National Democratic Front (NDFP) had signed an agreement enabling a permanent ceasefire, has been seen as a significant step forward, especially when viewed against the turbulent backdrop of President Rodrigo Duterte’s first months in office. A number of left-wing groups come under the NDFP banner, including the Communist Party of the Philippines, the New People’s Army and the Moro Resistance and Liberation Organization. The August ceasefire agreement opens the way for intensive talks on political and constitutional reforms that could lead to the final settlement of a conflict that has gone on with varying degrees of intensity since 1968.

In addition to injecting momentum into the NDFP negotiations,…

On 30 August ICMP announced the launch of its restructured Online Inquiry Center (OIC). The OIC can be accessed by families of the missing and others to provide or obtain information about a missing person. It is part of an advanced software solution used to manage large-scale missing persons programs throughout the world.

“The OIC is a unique and invaluable tool that gives stakeholders – including families of the missing and those who are responsible for locating and identifying missing persons – access to ICMP’s database, which currently contains information on around 40,000 missing persons,” said ICMP Director-General Kathryne Bomberger.

Currently, the OIC can be accessed in English, Arabic, Spanish, Albanian, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. More languages will be added in due course.

The OIC user can provide a variety of data about a missing person, including their physical description, data about their closest living relative(s) and…

By Bert Segier

At Leiden University in The Hague, the Centre for Innovation and its partners organized a week-long Summer School on Big Data for Peace and Justice in August, at which ICMP participated. The Centre for Innovation describes itself as a ”do tank” (in other words a tank that “does” as well as “thinks”). Its mission is “to explore and create enterprising projects at the juncture of education, technology and society”.

On 16 August, ICMP was represented on an expert panel of Innovators for Peace and Justice. The event included an interactive session where audience members had an opportunity to engage with ICMP’s Director of Institutional and Civil Society Development, Deborah Ruiz Verduzco, and with experts from the UN World Food Programme, PeaceTech Lab and UN Global Pulse on “the opportunities and challenges of innovation for peace and…

The International Day of the Disappeared was established to draw attention to the fate of individuals detained, often in brutal conditions, in places that are unknown to their relatives and loved ones and/or their legal representatives. The initiative originated with the Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of Detained-Disappeared (Federación Latinoamericana de Asociaciones de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos, or FEDEFAM), a non-governmental organization founded in 1981 in Cost Rica, as an association of local and regional groups actively working against secret imprisonment, forced disappearances and abduction in a number of Latin American countries.

On 21 December 2010, Resolution 65/209 of the UN General Assembly expressed deep concern over “the increase in enforced or involuntary disappearances in various regions of the world, including arrest, detention and abduction, when these are part of or amount to enforced disappearances, and by the growing…

The Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Long-lasting Peace, signed by the Government of Colombia and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo (FARC-EP), creates a foundation on which work can begin to establish social and political processes that embed peace.

The decision by 50.24 percent of voters in Colombia’s 2 October referendum to reject the agreement means that provisions will have to be renegotiated, but a ceasefire remains in place and talks were set to resume in Havana immediately after the referendum result was announced.  The coming months are crucial: the opportunity to change the direction of a society that has endured violence since the middle of the last century must be seized in a decisive way.

ICMP Director-General Kathryne Bomberger, welcomed the announcement in August that the Government and the FARC had reached agreement at the…