Hanoi, Vietnam 26 July 2023 – During the week, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology (VAST) have hosted a series of events aimed at enhancing efforts to account for the large number of missing persons and unidentified human remains from the Vietnam-American War. The project is funded and generously supported by US Agency for International Development.

Senior representatives from ICMP participating in this week’s events include Ms. Thảo Griffiths, Board Member of the ICMP, Ms. Kathryne Bomberger, Director-General of ICMP, Dr. Thomas Parsons, Member of the ICMP Expert Panel and an expert on forensic genetics, and two senior ICMP scientists from the ICMP DNA Laboratory in The Hague, specializing in Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies.

On Monday, 24 July, during a workshop organized by VAST, together with representatives from the Center for DNA Identification (CDI), the Institute for Biotechnology (IBT), the Department…

Srebrenica, 11 July 2023: The remains of 30 victims of the Srebrenica Genocide were buried at the Potocari Memorial Cemetery near Srebrenica today.

More than 7,000 victims of the Genocide have been identified as a result of the DNA-led identification process pioneered by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP). Each year, the remains of more victims are buried. The process of identification and reassembly of skeletal remains can involve recovery from multiple clandestine gravesites and may continue for a period of years.

Attending today’s ceremony at Potocari, together with staff from ICMP’s Western Balkans Program, Director-General Kathryne Bomberger said the thousands of white headstones that line the hillside opposite the factory where men and boys were separated from their families in July 1995, testify to the “unremitting necessity of justice.”

Ms Bomberger stressed that “each of the people buried in this cemetery has been named,” and the facts of the Genocide…

Sarajevo, 10 July 2023: The DNA-led process developed in Bosnia and Herzegovina to identify victims of the Srebrenica Genocide and other crimes has contributed to a fundamental change in the way that countries address issues of truth and justice in war, the Director-General of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), Kathryne Bomberger, said today.

Ms Bomberger was speaking in Potocari at an international conference on Srebrenica organized by Srebrenica Memorial Center and World Jewish Congress. She noted that in the years immediately after the war in former Yugoslavia “some argued that documenting the crime and identifying the victims would undermine efforts to restore peace. During those years, when the process of identification was slow, Genocide denial was rife.”

However, when ICMP launched a radically new process in 2001 based on comparing DNA from unidentified human remains with DNA taken from living relatives of missing persons, the pace of identifications quickened…

The Hague, 7 July 2023: In Srebrenica on 11 July, 30 victims of the 1995 Genocide will be buried. Their bodies have been exhumed from clandestine graves and identified. At least six of those to be buried this year were teenagers when they were murdered.

More than 7,000 of the 8,000 victims of the Genocide have been identified, the vast majority through DNA testing. The DNA-led process has been indispensable because the perpetrators of the Srebrenica Genocide tried to hide the evidence of their crime by systematically digging up mass graves in the weeks and months after the murders and distributing the bodies of victims in secondary and tertiary clandestine graves across eastern Bosnia.

On average, seven or eight separate DNA match reports are issued for each identified victim. This is because the bones of individual victims have been found in multiple mass graves.

In many cases, relatives of the victims choose…

The Hague, 5 July 2023: Following the sinking of a fishing boat packed with migrants off the Greek coast on 14 June, the authorities in Greece and other countries have an obligation under international and domestic law to take effective steps to locate and identify victims and in due course repatriate their remains. More than 600 people may have drowned in the sinking of the Adriana. As many as one hundred children are among the missing.

Since 2018, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has been working with the governments of Cyprus, Greece, Italy and Malta to develop a Joint Process to account for missing migrants. Following the 14 June shipwreck, ICMP immediately offered to have blood-collection kits shipped to Athens with a view to taking reference samples from relatives of those who had gone missing. These samples can be compared with DNA taken from unidentified…