The Committee on Missing Persons (CMP) embarks on a Cyprus-wide research to assess the needs of families with missing persons.
Nestoras Nestoros, the Greek Cypriot member of the CMP told CNA that the assessment will focus on services the CMP provided to the relatives, from the moment they lost their beloved one until today. At the same time, the research will assess government handling of the same issue, he added.
“This is happening for the first time, no similar research has been conducted before” neither by the CMP, nor by the Red Cross, Nestoros said.
He added that in the first stage, they will assess the needs of families who found their missing person and will turn subsequently to families where the identification is still pending. These two categories of people are going through very different experiences, Nestoros noted.
He went on to say that the CMP is signing soon an agreement with the University of Nicosia to conduct the family-needs assessment in the free areas of the Republic of Cyprus. A similar research will also take place in the Turkish-occupied part of Cyprus.
The Greek Cypriot member also said they hoped to evaluate the results of this research and make use of them in the future, both in the CMP and on the level of the competent authorities.
CMP members to attend conference in Buenos Aires
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All three members of the CMP are travelling to Buenos Aires to attend next week the “International Conference on Archives and Human Rights: An agenda to strengthen democracy”.
The conference, to be held between March 14 and 16, is hosted by the International Center for the Promotion of Human Rights of Argentina, together with the research institute Swisspeace of Switzerland and the National Center for Historical Memory of Colombia.
Paul-Henri Arni, Gulden Plumer Kucuk and Nestoras Nestoros were invited by the organizers to address a workshop on March 15, and speak about “Access and accessibility of human rights archives”.
As Nestoros said, they will present the way they managed archives in Cyprus, the methodology they used, and will also speak about the next steps.
Highlighting the importance of these archives, Nestoros noted that “internal archives that preceded CMP helped us find more than half” of our missing persons, while the effort now focuses on archives kept by third parties and international organizations, in order to discover new burial places.
According to the organizers of the conference, archives related to grave violations of human rights are vital for political transitions and the consolidation of democracy. As an instrument to provide traces of a violent past, such archives play an important role as evidence in the judicial procedures to fight against impunity, it is added.
Conference participants include national and international institutions and individuals working on archives and human rights, and they are expected to exchange knowledge and identify good practices in this field.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkish troops invaded and occupied its northern third. Since then, the fate of hundreds of people remains unknown.
A Committee on Missing Persons has been established, upon agreement between the leaders of the two communities, with the scope of exhuming, identifying and returning the remains of missing persons to their relatives.