By Nikolas Kyriacou

Enforced disappearance is a severe human rights violation with historical roots and global prevalence, perpetrated by state and non-state actors, leaving victims and families in a state of uncertainty. This article explores its legal dimensions in international human rights law. While definitions vary slightly across instruments, a core definition has emerged from the UN Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance, the Inter-American Convention, the Rome Statute and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. Key elements include deprivation of liberty, state involvement or acquiescence, and state refusal to acknowledge the person’s fate, placing them outside of any legal protection.

Enforced disappearance is characterized as a multiple human rights violation. It inherently violates the right to liberty and security, and can involve the right not to be subjected to torture. It also frequently serves as a precursor to violations of the right to life. International human rights mechanisms have addressed these violations through various remedies. While the monetary compensation offered by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is noted as inconsistent and opaque, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) has developed a broader system including monetary and diverse non-monetary measures, emphasizing the duty to investigate and the right to truth. The 2007 International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (CPED) offers the most comprehensive framework, explicitly recognizing the rights to justice and reparation, which includes compensation, restitution, rehabilitation, satisfaction and guarantees of non-repetition. Despite these advancements, challenges in implementation and enforcement persist, highlighting the ongoing need for global commitment to end impunity and ensure justice.

Journal of Disappearance Studies, v. 1, 2025.

By Sara  De Vido 

Violence against women is characterised by its universality, the multiplicity of its forms, and the intersectionality of diverse kinds of discrimination against women. Great emphasis in legal analysis has been placed on sex-based discrimination; however, in investigations of violence, one aspect has been overlooked: violence may severely affect women's health and access to reproductive health, and State health policies might be a cause of violence against women. Exploring the relationship between violence against women and women's rights to health and reproductive health, Sara De Vido theorises the new concept of violence against women's health in international law using the Hippocratic paradigm, enriching human rights-based approaches to women's autonomy and reflecting on the pervasiveness of patterns of discrimination. At the core of the book are two dimensions of violence: horizontal 'inter-personal', and vertical 'state policies'. Investigating these dimensions through decisions made by domestic, regional and international judicial or quasi-judicial bodies, De Vido reconceptualises States' obligations and eventually asks whether international law itself is the ultimate cause of violence against women's health.

Manchester UK: Manchester University Press, 2020.

By Mary Holper

Alleged mandatory immigration detainees are unable to access federal court review of whether they are illegally detained without a bond hearing. The conviction that causes a detainee to be deportable also causes mandatory detention, so that the substantive findings in the deportation litigation path and detention litigation path overlap, even though their consequences differ. In this situation, habeas courts invoke 8 U.S.C. § 1252(b)(9)— the “zipper clause”—a 1996 statute barring habeas petitions. With § 1252(b)(9), Congress intended to “zip” all claims “arising from any action taken or proceeding brought to remove” a noncitizen into a single circuit court petition for review of a final removal order. But the detention and deportation litigation paths are two sides of an unmatched zipper. One path leads to deportation while the other leads to detention without a bond hearing pending the decision on deportation.

This article exposes a problem that, while under-litigated in immigration detention law, is robbing alleged mandatory detainees of their right to access habeas corpus in order to challenge their illegal detention. As a solution, this article proposes the “Great Writ,” habeas corpus, as a remedy. Because the alleged mandatory detainees do not seek a review of their removal orders, and seek only release from custody, they invoke the “core” of habeas corpus. Although a federal appellate court will ultimately review the substantive legal question that causes both their deportation and detention, that review comes too little, and too late. Thus, it provides no adequate substitute for habeas corpus because there is no meaningful opportunity to demonstrate, to a politically independent adjudicator, that the noncitizen is illegally detained. For these detainees, § 1252(b)(9) has proven to be an ill-fitted zipper that allows illegal executive detention to continue for months and years. If the core of the Suspension Clause is to mean anything, it must guard these detainees’ liberty interests.

Boston College Law School, Boston College Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No. 634, 2024. 53p.