The Hague 5 March 2019: The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is pleased to announce that former Foreign Minister of El Salvador María Eugenia Brizuela de Ávila and former Foreign Minister of the Kingdom of the Netherlands Bert Koenders will join ICMP’s Board of Commissioners.

ICMP Commissioners are actively involved in addressing the global challenge of missing persons and represent ICMP at the highest diplomatic and governmental levels worldwide.

“The Board of Commissioners is delighted to welcome two such distinguished public figures to its ranks,” ICMP Chair Thomas Miller said today. “As ICMP extends its support to countries around the world, it is important that the Board has the capacity to engage effectively at a global level, and I believe that our capacity to do this will be enhanced by the involvement of our new colleagues.”

Accepting the invitation to serve on the Board, Ms Brizuela de Ávila noted that she has been a long-time supporter of ICMP’s “effective efforts to address the issue of missing persons.”

Ms Brizuela de Ávila’s insight and experience will be invaluable, particularly in relation to ICMP’s operations in Latin America, where it has programs in Mexico and Colombia and has worked with stakeholders in a number of countries, including Chile and El Salvador. In November 2015, El Salvador became the sixth country to sign the Agreement establishing ICMP as a treaty-based international organization.

Mr Koenders described the issue of missing persons as “a pressing global challenge” and expressed satisfaction that ICMP’s mandate now encompasses migration and disasters as well as other circumstances where persons go missing for involuntary reasons.

Mr Koenders was at the forefront of the diplomatic effort that made it possible for ICMP to obtain the status of an international organization, and he supported the setting up of ICMP’s Headquarters in The Hague in 2015, and its laboratory in The Hague in 2017.

ICMP is a treaty-based intergovernmental organization with Headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands. Its mandate is to secure the cooperation of governments and others in locating and identifying missing persons from conflict, human rights abuses, disasters, organized crime, irregular migration and other causes and to assist them in doing so. It is the only international organization tasked exclusively to work on the issue of missing persons.