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	25,000 people “disappeared” or reported missing since 2006 in Mexico by Human Rights Watch   Nov 2013   Mexico: Build Accurate Database of Disappeared - Process should be accompanied by Justice and Search for Victims.   Important as it is to create an accurate national registry, the government can’t forget that this is only one part of fulfilling its fundamental obligation to investigate disappearances, search for the missing, sanction those responsible, and ensure that families of the disappeared are given the economic and psychological support they’ve long been denied. - José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director.   The Mexican government should ensure that the process of developing a national database of the disappeared is thorough, efficient, and transparent, Human Rights Watch reports.   Development of the database should be coupled with serious investigations to determine the fate of thousands of people who remain unaccounted for.   The government announced in February 2013 that it was revising a database of more than 26,000 people reported disappeared or missing (extraviadas) that had been compiled by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office (PGR). The government has said that many of the names in the database are likely to be removed. There are substantial problems with the original list, including inconsistencies and incomplete data, and it lacks the names of many people reported disappeared.   “The Peña Nieto government took an important step toward acknowledging the scale of the disappearance crisis when it released its provisional list of disappeared and missing people,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “Now the government needs to live up to its promise to develop a reliable, comprehensive registry, accompanied by serious investigations to search for the disappeared and bring those responsible to justice.”   On February 20, Human Rights Watch released a report, “Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Crisis Ignored,” which found that Mexican security forces had participated in widespread enforced disappearances in the context of former president Felipe Calderón’s “war on drugs,” from December 2006 to December 2012.   Investigations into these cases were inept or completely absent, Human Rights Watch found. Officials often wasted crucial time by instructing families to wait for days after a disappearance before filing a report, told relatives to search for evidence themselves, and groundlessly accused the victims of being involved in organized crime. If the authorities opened investigations, they often failed to take basic steps such as interviewing witnesses. Human Rights Watch documented 249 disappearances during the Calderón administration, finding compelling evidence of enforced disappearance in 149 of those cases. Enforced disappearances occur when a person is deprived of liberty, with the involvement of state agents, followed by a refusal to disclose their fate and whereabouts. The government has the responsibility to investigate even those cases where there is no evidence that state agents were involved.   Human Rights Watch found that one of the factors impeding efforts to search for the disappeared and identify those responsible was the lack of coordination between various state and federal authorities. Mexico has no national system that allows states to share and search for information on missing persons – or to alert police and check hospitals, prisons, and other institutions when someone has disappeared. The lack of such a registry has also made it difficult to determine the scale of disappearances nationwide.   Human Rights Watch called on Mexican authorities to put in place a series of measures to address the issue, including establishing a comprehensive, accurate national database of the disappeared, with information on their physical characteristics and genetic data from relatives, accompanied by a database of unidentified human remains. This would allow officials across the country to access data on the disappeared, facilitating searches and investigation, and would indicate the scale of the problem, helping the authorities to identify patterns and develop preventive measures.   On February 20, the day Human Rights Watch released its report, the government acknowledged for the first time the existence of a database of thousands of people reported disappeared or missing under the previous administration. Interior Minister Miguel Osorio Chong confirmed on February 21 that the government had found a database developed by the previous administration with more than 27,000 names of missing people.   http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/11/12/mexico-build-accurate-database-disappeared   Feb 2013   The Crisis of Enforced Disappearances   (Mexico City) – Mexico’s security forces have participated in widespread enforced disappearances, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released this week. Virtually none of the victims have been found or those responsible brought to justice, exacerbating the suffering of families of the disappeared, Human Rights Watch found.   The report, “Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Crisis Ignored,”documents nearly 250 “disappearances” during the administration of former President Felipe Calderón, from December 2006 to December 2012. In 149 of those cases, Human Rights Watch says it found compelling evidence of enforced disappearances, involving the participation of state agents.   “President Peña Nieto has inherited one of worst crises of disappearances in the history of Latin America,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “While his administration has announced some important measures to assist victims, it has yet to take the steps necessary to ensure that those responsible for these horrific crimes are brought to justice.”   Human Rights Watch found evidence that members of all branches of the security forces carried out enforced disappearances: the Army, the Navy, and the federal and local police. In some cases, such as a series of more than 20 enforced disappearances by Navy personnel in June and July 2011 in Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, the common modus operandi of the crimes, the scale of the operations, and the inconsistent accounts by the Navy suggest the crimes may have been planned and coordinated.   In over 60 cases, Human Rights Watch says it found evidence that state agents collaborated directly with organized crime groups to “disappear” people and extort payments from their families.   For example, evidence indicates that local police in Pesquería, Nuevo León arbitrarily detained 19 construction workers in May 2011 and handed them over to an organized crime group. The men have not been seen since.   The nearly 250 disappearances documented in the report do not represent all of the cases in Mexico since 2007. On the contrary, official statistics leave little doubt that there are thousands more.   A provisional list compiled by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office and the Interior Ministry of more than 25,000 people who were “disappeared” or reported missing since 2006 was leaked to the media in November 2012.   Prosecutors and law enforcement officials consistently fail to search thoroughly and promptly for people reported missing or to investigate those responsible for the disappearances. All too often, these officials blame the victims and tell families it is their responsibility to investigate, Human Rights Watch found. What limited steps prosecutors take are undermined by recurring delays, errors, and omissions.   In none of the 249 cases documented by Human Rights Watch have the people responsible been convicted for carrying out disappearances.   The inept or altogether absent investigations exacerbate the suffering of the families, for whom not knowing what happened to their loved ones is a source of perpetual anguish, states the Human Rights Watch report. Making matters worse, families of the disappeared may lose access to basic social services that are tied to the victim’s employment, forcing them to fight slow, costly, and emotionally draining battles to restore essential benefits such as child care.   Luz María Durán Mota – whose 17-year-old son, Israel Arenas Durán, was disappeared together with three co-workers in Monterrey, Nuevo León after being detained by local police in June 2011 – told Human Rights Watch, “It is a daily torture, not knowing where he is. If they are torturing him. If he has eaten anything.”   Efforts by the Calderón administration to address this problem were belated and grossly inadequate. For most of his presidency, Calderón denied that security forces had committed human rights violations. In his last year he acknowledged that abuses had occurred and pledged to take steps to address them. But he did not fulfill most of his commitments, such as completing a national registry of the disappeared, or submitting a new legislative proposal to Congress to reform the Code of Military Justice that complied with four rulings on the issue by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.   The report also documents examples of positive steps at the state level to address disappearances. In Nuevo León, government officials and prosecutors, responding to pressure from victims’ families and human rights defenders, have begun to investigate seriously a select group of approximately 50 disappearance cases.   While progress so far has been limited, and only a few disappeared people have been found, the collaborative effort shows how winning back the trust of victims’ families and empowering them to hold prosecutors accountable can help overcome some of the greatest obstacles to investigations.   Ultimately, the success of state-level efforts will depend in large measure on whether the federal government takes steps to address the problem. To this end, Human Rights Watch urged the Mexican government to:   Establish comprehensive, accurate national databases of the disappeared and of unidentified human remains;   Reform the Military Code of Justice to ensure that all alleged human rights violations, including enforced disappearances, committed by military personnel against civilians are investigated and prosecuted in the civilian justice system;   Revise the definition of enforced disappearance in federal and state laws to ensure that it is consistent across Mexico and in line with international human rights law; and   Issue an executive order mandating the immediate presentation of all detainees before the public prosecutor’s office and making clear that under no circumstances may detainees be taken to military installations, police stations, or illegal detention facilities.   An enforced disappearance is a “continuous” crime under international law: it persists, and continues to inflict suffering on the victim’s family, as long as the fate of the missing person is unknown or concealed.   “While disappearances may have started on Calderón’s watch, they did not end with his term,” Vivanco said. “Thousands of the disappeared are still missing.. and the victims’ families continue to suffer from not knowing what happened to their loved ones.”   http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/02/20/mexico-crisis-enforced-disappearances Visit the related web page
	Haiti: Forced evictions worsen the already dire lot of earthquake homeless by Amnesty International   Forced evictions in Haiti are worsening the already desperate situation of thousands of people still living in displacement camps more than three years after the devastating earthquake of January 2010, Amnesty International said as it launched the report ‘Nowhere to go’: Forced evictions in Haiti’s camps for displaced people.   “Appeals from Amnesty International and other NGOs to halt the forced evictions have fallen on deaf ears - not only has the Haitian government not put an end to them, but it has allowed them to increase since the beginning of this year,” said Javier Zúñiga, Special Advisor at Amnesty International.   Almost 1,000 families have been forcibly evicted from their homes between January and March this year – an about-turn from 2012 when forced evictions were on the decline, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).   These 977 new families evicted come on top of the at least 60,978 people who were forcibly evicted between July 2010 and the end of 2012. Many of these forced evictions have been carried out or condoned by the authorities.   “Forced evictions threaten nearly a quarter of the more than 320,000 people still living in camps more than three years on from the earthquake,” said Zúñiga.   “This is a story of ongoing human rights violations creating deep suffering. People who most suffered from the earthquake were those living in extreme poverty. They have been living in camps with appalling living conditions. And, as if this were not enough, they are threatened with forced evictions and, eventually, made homeless again. Each time it becomes increasingly difficult for them to find a new location and the means to rebuild their lives.”   It’s the story of people like Cléane Etienne – police officers forcibly evicted her last January from Camp Fanm Koperatif, in the capital Port-au-Prince. She lost not only her shelter, but also all of her belongings –including the materials she needed to sustain a small business.   Suze Mondesir, another former resident of Camp Fanm Koperatif, recounted her family’s ordeal: "Around 10am a group of police officers accompanied by men armed with machetes and knives arrived at the camp. They insulted us and began to demolish our tents. The men pushed us around and the police waved their guns at us to prevent us from reacting."   Such testimonies included in the report show how forced evictions are often accompanied by systematic intimidation, harassment and violence. In most cases, the makeshift shelters and belongings of those forcibly evicted are completely destroyed.   Forced evictions are, however, just one aspect of problems related to the right to adequate housing in Haiti.   Living conditions in displacement camps have been constantly degrading. The lack of access to services such as water, sanitation and waste disposal have put residents at risk of infectious diseases. The lack of security in the camps has made the lives of the residents a constant fear, particularly for the women and girls, many of whom have been victims of sexual violence.   Housing was a chronic problem in Haiti even before the earthquake when international organizations estimated a deficit of 700,000 houses – Haiti has a population of just in excess of 10 million people.   Acknowledging that the housing situation needs to be addressed in a comprehensive way, the Haitian government is currently drafting the country’s first ever housing policy.   “We welcome that for the first time the government is proposing a national strategy for the development of the housing sector and we hope that the new version will rectify some elements of the previous draft, in order to ensure this policy will enable the fulfilment of the right to adequate housing for all in Haiti,” said Zúñiga.   “The massive ongoing earthquake recovery effort is an opportunity to address the housing problem in Haiti. However, in order to do that, the authorities need to put human rights at the heart of their reconstruction plans.”   Background information   More than three years after the devastating earthquake that left more than 200,000 people dead and some 2.3 million homeless, tens of thousands of families are still living in shelters. The majority of them are women and children. Life for those made homeless has been extremely difficult. They have struggled to make a living for themselves and their families with little access to safe drinking water, sanitation, health care, schools or other essential services.   The number of internally displaced people and the number of makeshift camps have been decreasing since July 2010, from a peak of some 1.5 million people living in 1,555 camps to 320,051 people living in 385 camps as of the end of March 2013, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).   Thousands of families have left the camps for other accommodation provided through different projects and programmes. However, forced evictions appear to have become an important factor leading to the reduction in camp numbers.   The report is part of Amnesty International’s Demand Dignity campaign, which focuses on human rights violations that drive and deepen poverty. Amnesty International is focusing on human rights violations against people living in informal settlements and slums, calling on all governments to end forced evictions.   International human rights standards state that evictions should only be carried out as a last resort and only after a complete list of procedural safeguards has been put in place. They include: genuine consultation with residents to identify feasible alternatives to eviction; adequate prior notice; and compensation and adequate alternative housing for those who cannot provide for themselves. None of these safeguards is being implemented in Haiti.   http://amnesty.org/en/news/haiti-forced-evictions-worsen-already-dire-lot-earthquake-homeless-2013-04-23 http://reliefweb.int/ http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/poverty-and-human-rights http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/all http://livewire.amnesty.org Visit the related web page
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