Monthly Archives: December 2018

Meeting of ICMP Conference of States Parties

Filed under Press Releases

The Hague, 18 December: Representatives of states and organizations that support the work of the International Commission on Missing persons (ICMP) gathered today at ICMP’s headquarters in The Hague for the second meeting of the ICMP Conference of States Parties (CSP). The first CSP meeting was held in October 2015, just under a year after ICMP became a treaty-based intergovernmental organization.

At today’s meeting, Chile assumed the presidency of the CSP, taking over from the United Kingdom. The meeting was chaired by Chile’s Ambassador to the Netherlands Maria Teresa Infante. Ambassador Infante opened the meeting by asking colleagues to observe a minute’s silence to commemorate the contribution of the late Wim Kok, to ICMP and to the global effort to account for missing persons. Mr Kok, a former Dutch prime minister, became an ICMP Commissioner in 2002 and was…

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Profiles of the Missing: Call for Coordinated Action To Address Issue of Missing Persons from the Syrian Conflict

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The Hague 10 December 2018: Families of missing persons are entitled to solidarity, from governments and others, Her Majesty Queen Noor said today, adding that, as well as solidarity, “they need us to understand the nature of their struggle. We must listen and we must act.”

HM Queen Noor was speaking at a conference on “Syria: Effective Responses” organized at the Representation of the European Commission in Berlin today by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP).

ICMP’s Syria/MENA Program, launched with EU funding in 2017, is working on a range of activities including collecting personal data from families – a key step toward establishing an effective process that can be expanded after a peace settlement. In Berlin today, ICMP brought representatives of families of the missing, from Syria and elsewhere, together with experts and senior policymakers to examine strategies that families can adopt in order to access their rights to…

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Accounting for the Missing in the Western Balkans Continues with the Support of the United Kingdom

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Sarajevo 4 December 2018: The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has convened the first meeting of the Missing Persons Group (MPG), in Herceg Novi, Montenegro. The MPG will supervise operations under the Framework Plan signed in November in The Hague by the representatives of the domestic institutions responsible for missing persons issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia.

At the two-day meeting, which ended today, the MPG clearly defined the next steps to resolve as many as possible of the estimated 12,000 missing persons cases that are still outstanding. This includes action to resolve “NN” (no name, or unidentified) cases in mortuaries across the region through targeted pilot projects; procedures for sharing data on the missing and potential locations of clandestine gravesites among the members of the MPG; and joint participation at excavations of mutual interest.

Matthew Holliday, the Head of ICMP’s Western Balkans Program, commended the…

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