Past Conflicts, Present Uncertainty: Legal Answers to the Quest for Information on Missing Persons and Victims of Enforced Disappearance. Three Case Studies from the European Context

This article is intended to provide a legally sound explanation of why and how the contemporary International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law legal frameworks offer tools to address the uncertainty, lack of information, and the consequences thereof in relation to missing persons and victims of enforced disappearances in the context of armed conflicts which predated the adoption of such frameworks. To this end, three scenarios will be examined: the contemporary claims of the families of those who were killed in the Katyń massacre in 1940; the claims for information and justice of the families of thousands who were subjected to enforced disappearances during the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939; and the identification efforts concerning those reported missing while involved in military operations in the context of the 1944 Kaprolat/Hasselmann incident which took place during the Second World War. The analysis of these scenarios is conducive to the development of more general reflections that would feed into the debate over the legal relevance of the distant past in light of today’s international legal framework.