Fighting enforced disappearance across generations. Shark Island´s buried atrocities.
Newsletter
2024
International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearance on 30 August calls attention to the traumatic nature of this crime for victims and their communities. As efforts to locate the disappeared can stretch across decades, these crimes leave their mark on the next generation. When right-wing governments across the world seek to minimize, or even legitimize, such crimes, we must fight back against all forms of institutionalized forgetting. And this year has seen some success: in Germany, the adoption of crucial reforms now makes it easier to prosecute crimes of enforced disappearance.
Last week, we jointly filed a complaint against high-ranking Syrian officials for torture, murder and enforced disappearance. Also, our complaint against the supermarket chain Edeka has led to the suspension of sustainability certificates for the Guatemalan palm oil producer NaturAceites. Read more on these cases in this newsletter, along with our report on a trip to Shark Island, Namibia, to investigate the remnants of colonial crimes.
