UN urges member states to ratify convention to combat enforced disappearances News
UN urges member states to ratify convention to combat enforced disappearances

[JURIST] Multiple UN experts on Tuesday urged [press release] all member states to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance [text, PDF] as the rates of enforced disappearances are increasing in multiple countries in every region around the world. The experts argued that in today’s political climate, it is unacceptable that enforced disappearances, a wide-spread practice in which persons are secretly abducted or even imprisoned by state actors or third parties acting with the government’s support, continue to transpire on every continent. They further argued that the convention would put in place many legal changes which will reduce and prevent enforced disappearances. Among these changes is a requirement to hold individuals “deprived of their liberty” in detention centers which are officially recognized. Additionally, the convention would require the government to acknowledge the identity of all such persons to the general public. The experts also argued that member states should begin to aid and enable human right workers who are currently combating the issue of enforced disappearances.

While enforced disappearance has been a worldwide problem, the most well-documented recent case of disappearance took place in Mexico in 2014. In 2016, a panel of experts released [JURIST report] its second and last report on its inquiry into the 43 undergraduate students from a teachers college in Ayotzinapa who went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, in 2014, stating that the Mexican government has hampered the investigation. In January 2016 three men were arrested [JURIST report] for their possible connection to the disappearance as part of the government’s story. In November 2015 Mexico’s own National Human Rights Commission criticized [JURIST report] the Mexican Attorney General’s Office and other government offices involved in the investigation for failing to comply with its recommendations. In October 2015 Human Rights Watch reported [JURIST report] that there was evidence of unlawful police killing in the country. Also, in October 2015 Mexican Attorney General Arely Gómez González released [JURIST report] a 54,000 page file detailing the Mexican government’s investigation. This will be the second time [JURIST report] that UN affiliates have called on all governments to make a concerted effort to fight against enforced disappearances.

THIS DAY @ LAW

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.

Former communist countries admitted for EU accession

On April 16, 2003, the 2003 Treaty of Accession was signed by 10 countries, admitting them for European Union (EU) ascension. After Malta and Cyprus, eight of the ten new EU nations (Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) were former communist countries. The signing of the treaty in Athens marked the first time that former members of the Soviet Bloc joined the EU.

Learn more about EU expansion from the organization's website.

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