The number of people missing in conflicts around the world is at its highest level ever, with more than 56,000 new cases recorded in 2024, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) recently warned.
Some 56,559 new missing persons were registered in 2024, bringing the total number of cases currently monitored by the ICRC to almost 255,000.
“The ICRC is registering unprecedented numbers of missing persons,” said Fernando Fornaris, the body’s humanitarian affairs adviser, at a United Nations General Assembly session devoted to the issue.
“This is the highest increase in at least twenty years. An unprecedented number of large scale conflicts and the disregard for international humanitarian law are resulting in vast numbers of people going missing,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said during the meeting.
Conflict, the focus of the UN meeting, sees people go missing because they are killed, tortured, mistreated, kidnapped, detained, or fleeing the fighting. However, those figures must be added to people disappeared by military dictatorships or as the result of state repression, or those who disappear along migratory routes.
Over the past 45 years a working group under the UN Human Rights Council has dealt with more than 62,000 enforced disappearances, which Turk says is just the tip of a very large iceberg.
Despite a law criminalizing enforced disappearances, or the Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act of 2012, it is still happening in the Philippines, usually to activists like labor organizers and indigenous rights activists. Since 2022, 14 people have been forcibly disappeared, and despite the law, there are still no significant convictions, which corroborates the culture of impunity and imparts a chilling effect on society.
So many people have gone missing due to conflict, repression, and other reasons, but in the end it is governments that are primarily to blame for failing to protect their people. We can do so much better, and even if gains are being made, never stop until everyone is safe from disappearing or being disappeared.*
