TRC Final Report

Volume 6

Section 4

Chapter 1

Subsection 2

DEFINITION OF A DISAPPEARANCE

11. In order to deal with this category of violation, the Commission had to define it. While its founding Act, the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act No. 34 of 1995 (the Act) used the term ‘abduction’, this was intended to cover enforced disappearances at the hands of the state, persons who had gone missing in exile or combat, and other missing persons.

12. The Commission had recourse to a number of working definitions developed by human rights groups working in the field. One such was the definition used by Amnesty International, which defined ‘disappeared persons’ as those ‘who have been taken into custody by agents of the State, yet whose whereabouts and fate are concealed, and whose custody is denied’¹. Amnesty International places the term ‘disappeared person’ between inverted commas in order to indicate that the persons in question have not really disappeared, but that there a re those who know their whereabouts and deliberately remain silent.

13. The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances has, in its recent work, begun to define ‘a disappearance’ as ‘a person arrested, detained, abducted or otherwise deprived of his/her liberty by officials of different branches or levels of government, or by organised groups or private individuals acting on their behalf, or with the support, direct or indirect, consent or acquiescence of the government, followed by a refusal to disclose the fact or whereabouts of the person concerned or a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of his/her liberty, thereby placing such persons outside the protection of the law’.²

14. The Commission finally defined the category ‘Abductions’ as ‘including those persons who were forcibly detained or arrested and last seen in the custody of the security forces or agents of the state, as well as those forcibly and unlawfully abducted by other known or unknown armed groups or parties’.

HOW DISAPPEARANCES RELATE TO OTHER HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS

15. Disappearances are inextricably bound up with other human rights violations. Often a disappearance is an unacknowledged form of imprisonment for political reasons. In many instances, a disappearance took place during the first days of custody and, more often than not, resulted in a political killing.

16. In some instances, the body was found. In the vast majority of cases that came to the Commission, however, this was not the case. This has condemned many families to a permanent state of limbo: never knowing, never being able to put it to rest.

17. It is acknowledged that the optimum time to solve a disappearance is in the first few days after it takes place. It is thus important to take action during this early period.