- Category: The Voice
Solidarity for Truth and Justice
The struggle for truth and justice always demands patience and persistence. Truth and Justice need to be reclaimed from those who stole them from us. Always, there is antagonism between the fighters, represented by victims of human rights violations and the thieves represented by state perpetrators. The success or failure of the struggle for truth and justice depends on the dynamics of these opposing forces in a given socio-political and economic context.
- Category: The Voice
Securing Safeguards for Human Rights
The act of disappearing people has long been identified only with the authoritarian and military dictatorships of Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. When these countries overthrew their dictators and moved forward to a period of democracy, people thought that enforced disappearance has also been incarcerated in the pages of history or buried along with the oppressors who have died. What they fail to actually see is that disappearance is a global concern. It is not merely contained within the boundaries of the Latin American region. Thus, it may have already faced the courts of justice in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala, Peru, etc. But in other regions, particularly in Asia, enforced disappearance continues to freely wreak terror and havoc in the lives of many families.
- Category: The Voice
"Happy Are Those Who Dream Dreams and Are Willing to Pay the Price…"
November 13, 2006 The Third Committee (Social, Cultural and Humanitarian) of The United Nations (UN), on the occasion of the 61st General Assembly held in New York, adopted by consensus the draft resolution on the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.
- Category: The Voice
"Convention Now!"
The Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD), in no small measure, feels victorious! The United Nations Inter-Sessional Open-Ended Working Group to Elaborate A Draft Legally-Binding Normative Instrument for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances finally approved the text of the United Nations Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. Initiated by the Latin American Federation of Associations of Relatives of Disappeared-Detainees (FEDEFAM) and much later actively joined by AFAD and supported by a number of international organizations from other continents, the struggle for an international treaty bore initial, yet significant fruit with the unanimous approval of the text on September 22, 2005 in Geneva, Switzerland.
- Category: The Voice
Hope Springs Eternal…
For AFAD, 2004 was very painful. Aasia Jeelani of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons was killed by a landmine blast in an election monitoring duty in the north of Kashmir on April 20, 2004. Four months later, on September 7, 2004, Munir, the Federation’s Chairperson, was poisoned by a lethal dosage of arsenic in a Garuda flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam and died two hours before arrival. The loss of these two committed human rights defenders caused us pain beyond words can describe.