In a much awaited landmark decision issued on March 4th, 2014, the Lebanon’s State Council finally recognized the right of the families to know the truth about their forcibly disappeared loved ones. Concretely, this obliges the State to deliver to the families all relevant documents that might help shedding light on the fate of their relatives who disappeared during the war.

However, the judicial body requested a stay in execution of this decision, arguing that giving away such information would constitute a threat to civil peace.The request was eventually rejected. In any case, that reaction is in line with the situation that prevailed in Lebanon ever since the conflict ended – a situation that may give the feeling that things are always taking two steps forward and one step back.

For the past three decades, the families have spared no energy in trying to prompt the authorities to assume their responsibilities – namely by setting up an independent and impartial Commission of inquiry, creating a comprehensive database, locating and protecting sites of mass graves, identifying the bodies and compensating for the damages suffered by the families.

Excuses were always found to ignore their demands or even perhaps to reject them altogether[1], and with good reason, as continuing offences are explicitly excluded from the scope of March 1991 “general amnesy law”. And, precisely, one specificity of the crime of enforced disappearance lies in its continuous nature: the crime is not definitively complete until the fate of the missing is clarified and, therefore, the period of limitation starts running at this very moment, not before.It means that perpetrators can still be prosecuted and that some former militants amond the leaders might be held accountable and face criminal charges today.

In any case, the March 2014 decision offers hope for significant changes. But it needs to be backed by a truly independent investigation in order to be fully effective. The three commissions created in 2000, 2001 and 2005 did not draw viable conclusions on the fate of the forcibly disappeared. Handing their reports over to the families  is of little help – although it is symbolically important.

The lack of a comprehensive database is another obstacle on the way to truth: a report issued by the government in 1991 stated that over 17.000 persons had gone missing during the conflict. This figure is most probably overrated as some disappearances were reported more than once and some returns never were. Anyhow, the actual number of disappeared people remains unknown 25 years after the end of the war.

After being involved for nearly four decades in the tracing of the missing, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) took it upon themselves to collect as much detailed information as possible on the victims and the circumstances of their arrests/abductions, until the Lebanese authorities agree to collect saliva samples from still living relatives in order to conduct DNA analysis.

Another draft law is currently being examined by the Lebanese Parliament. Hopefully, the fate of the forcibly disappeared in Lebanon will soon be clarified. However, the issue of the disappeared still detained in Syria remains delicate. In particular, what about those who are now detained on territories that are no longer controlled by the Syrian regime?In 2012, SOLIDE and the CFKDL published – with the support of International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) – a draft law aiming to address the issue of missing and forcibly disappeared persons in Lebanon. The 31-article document[2] echoed, point by point, the - already mentioned above - constant claims of the families of the disappeared. Somehow, civil society organizations were compelled to  take over and try to remedy the Lebanese State’s shortcomings.

 

Key dates:

1975-1990: during the Lebanese Civil War, thousands of people go missing at the hands of Lebanese militias and Lebanese, Syrian and Israeli armies

1982: the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon (CFKDL) is created

October 22, 1989: the Ta’if Agreement ends the Lebanese Civil War

1990: Support of Lebanese in Detention and Exile (SOLIDE) is established

March 1991: a General Amnesty Law grants amnesty to the crimes committed during the conflict: the perpetrators can no longer be prosecuted

January 2000: the first official Commission of Inquiry is set up. It only issued a “summary report” concluding that all those missing for over 4 years should be considered dead.

January 2001: a second Commission is established after the release of dozens of Lebanese detained in Syria discredited the findings of the 2000 Commission

April 2005: families of disappeared start holding a permanent sit-in in front of UN House in downtown Beirut.

August 2005: a Joint Syrian-Lebanese Committee is created to investigate cases of enforced disappearances involving the Syrian security forces. It never published any conclusions.

March 4, 2014: Lebanon’s State Council rules that the families of the disappeared have the right to know the truth about the fate of their loved ones.

 

International legal framework

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (2006) defines enforced disappearance as ”the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law” (Article 2) and obliges the Parties to criminalize it.

It was signed but never ratified by Lebanon.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) adopts a similar definition but also includes in its scope the arrest, abduction or detention by political organizations;enforced disappearance constitutes a crime against humanity “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” (Article 7) and falls therefore under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

Lebanon did not ratify the Statute.


[1] “Law for missing and forcibly disappeared persons”, 2012, available at http://www.actforthedisappeared.com/sites/default/files/Publications/Draft%20Law%20for%20Missing%20and%20Forcibly%20Disappeared%20Persons-2012-EN.pdf

[2] In 2011, the Euro-Mediterranean Federation Against Enforced Disappearances reported that families’ associations representatives’ and forensic doctors’ access to a potential mass grave in Shabaniyah was forbidden by the mayor, a military intelligence services representative and Internal Security Forces, after the authorities stated that the site contained nothing but bones of dogs and goats. Available at http://www.disparitions-euromed.org/article.php?n=58