Truth Beyond Borders: Regional Conference on Enforced Disappearances | Bangkok
Day 1: Truth Beyond Borders: Regional Conference on Enforced Disappearances | Bangkok
Our Chairperson, Dr. Saira Rahman Khan, opened the day with a truth this movement has always known: it is women — mothers, wives, sisters, daughters — who lead the fight against enforced disappearance. And with a promise: the names of the disappeared, and of detained defenders like our former Chairperson Khurram Parvez, now in his fifth year of incarceration, will always be repeated.
Highlights from a full day of exchange across Asia:
Research & Documentation — Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance unveiled its ED Heat Map, decades of standardized, victim-centered documentation made visible; Advocacy Forum-Nepal shared how 8,000+ documented cases became mass litigation before Nepal's Supreme Court; NKHR: Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights marked 30 years of building the record; and APDP reminded us why we document at all: to bear witness to what the state wants erased.
Psychosocial Support — Defence Of Human Rights & Public Services Pakistan shared mobile resilience units, art therapy for children of the disappeared, and survivors turned support-givers. The lesson: no mental health, no resilience — no resilience, no justice.
Campaign & Lobby — from advocacy by Odhikar that helped win Bangladesh's accession to the ICPPED and its Anti-ED law, to memory work in Sri Lanka and Thailand, to art as resistance.
The disappeared will only disappear if we let them. We won't.
Day 2: Regional Women's Congress | Truth Beyond Borders — Bangkok
“ We came carrying our objects and our memories. We leave carrying one another.”
Survivors, daughters, wives, sisters, and women human rights defenders from eleven countries and territories across Asia gathered for the Regional Women's Congress. They revisited the WEDGED journey and the learnings of local Women's Congresses, then explored intersectionality — where each woman brought a memory object of her disappeared loved one and mapped how culture, ethnicity, economy, and stigma cross in her search — before AFAD's women leaders shared practical tools in a roundtable on women's leadership in advocacy.
