Relatives of missing persons on Sunday met Stephen Toope, leader of the fact finding mission of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances and requested him to find out whereabouts of their missing relatives.
The UN delegation arrived in Kathmandu on December 6 to monitor the situation of disappearances in the country. The team will raise individual cases with the government after gathering information, reports said.
The mission arrived in Kathmandu amid reports that Nepal tops the list of countries in the world where people ‘disappear’ after they are taken into custody.
The group is supposed to present specific recommendations to the Nepal government regarding the violations of rights and disappearances of people. Since its establishment in 1980, the Working Group has taken up over 50,000 cases of alleged disappearances to over 70 governments, reports say.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) said recently that it has documented more than 1400 cases of people disappearing from both government and Maoist custody in Nepal. Of the above number, the majority of them have been reported as ‘disappeared’ after they were taken into custody by the security forces, the Commission said. nepalnews.com pd Dec 13 04