📑 Five priority areas of action for missing persons (Part III) - Project Milkbox 🥛

In order to respond to the problems linked to the disappearance of persons, a group of remarkable people identified five areas of action at the International Conference of governmental and non-governmental organizations on missing persons, held in Geneva from February 19 to 21 of 2003, by the invitation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. These five areas have been taken up by other international instances

III. Manage information and files relating to persons reported missing

• The collection and exchange of information by all interested parties must be carried out and coordinated in an active and adequate manner, in order to increase the effectiveness of the measures adopted to clarify what happened to persons reported missing as a result of an armed conflict or a situation of internal violence.

• The collection of accurate information (to determine the facts) is the first step that must be taken. However, you should never endanger the person in question or the source of the information. Coordination and exchange of information are necessary steps to increase the effectiveness of measures aimed at preventing the disappearance of people and to clarify the fate of people who have disappeared. So it is convenient to encourage the development and application of rules governing the collection and administration of information.

• The State authorities must create, at the latest at the beginning of an armed conflict, a National Information Office whose task will be to obtain and centralize, without any distinction of an unfavorable nature, all the possible information on the wounded, sick, deceased, deprived of liberty, as well as on the shipwrecked, the children whose identity is uncertain and the persons considered missing. People must communicate this information to the competent authorities and to the relatives, through the Central Search Agency of the International Committee of the Red Cross or other institutions, and must respond to all requests for information regarding the protected persons. You must also initiate all the necessary steps to obtain the required information that is not in your possession.

Example of a national mechanism: the National Information Office of the United Kingdom

The National Information Office of the United Kingdom is divided into two sections: the Prisoner of War Information Office, under the Ministry of Defense, and the Civil Information Office, which deals with prisoners held in British territory and depends on the Ministry of the Interior (also responsible for the police, immigration and prison authorities).

The National Information Office of the United Kingdom does not function except in time of war, when an occupying power is present on British soil and, possibly, in the framework of a support to the authorities of another country, when the prisoners detained for reasons of Security is placed under the responsibility of personnel of the British armed forces (as is currently the case in Iraq, where there is a legal basis for the detention of these persons).

Main source: https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/icrc_002_1117.pdf
Funds for this posts will be used to support different Red Cross initiaves and missing persons organizations.