State Responsibility for Disappearances Committed by Organised Criminal Groups
摘要
This chapter focuses exclusively on organised criminal groups (OCGs) as perpetrators of disappearances and assesses the extent to which victims of such disappearances, and their relatives, are protected by the current international legal framework. After briefly outlining the different manners in which OCGs can be involved in the commission of disappearances, it uses the international legal framework for the suppression of transnational organised crime and corruption as possible lex specialis to determine the content of state obligations to prevent and respond to disappearances committed by OCGs. This framework includes the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, its Protocols on Human Trafficking and Smuggling, and the United Nations Convention against Corruption. While these instruments have a different objective from human rights instruments, some provisions can nevertheless be drawn on to delineate the content of preventive obligations relating to disappearances committed by OCGs, as well as of the obligation to provide an effective remedy, particularly in cases involving human trafficking. In the absence of jurisprudence addressing OCGs as perpetrators of disappearances, or human rights violations more broadly, the chapter concludes with a normative proposal for how the determination of state responsibility should be approached in cases involving disappearances committed by OCGs. The proposal draws on the different approaches described in Chap. 3 and the particularities of OCGs as a non-state actor, which include its relationship to the state, and corruption and impunity as structural enablers.