The global challenge
for missing persons

Globally, enforced disappearance is used as a tool to spread terror in a wide range of contexts. In Latin America alone, dictatorships, civil wars, and organized crime are responsible for the disappearance of 300.000 people of which most of them are believed to be dead. In Africa and Asia combined, the number of disappearances goes into the millions and is for a large part not even accounted for.

Migration is a global challenge for a myriad of reasons. Certain is, whenever humans undertake long and risky journeys in large numbers, some inevitably lose their lives, far away from home and often without documentation. In Europe, over 20.000 migrants have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in the last 7 years. Other migration routes in South America, Asia, and Australia suffer from the same humanitarian disaster.

Armed conflicts in the last decades have left behind hundreds of thousands of people in mass graves without a chance for closure for the families and communities of the victims. Besides the obvious societal impacts of not identifying victims, studies have shown that the families left behind often experience trauma, mental health issues, and low quality of life as a consequence.