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A Forced disappearance occurs when an organization (usually a ruling government and that is usually a police state or dictatorship) forces a person to disappear from public view.
One way to done this is through murder. Typically, the murder is surreptitious, and the body disposed where it will (hopefully) never be found. The person simply vanishes. The party committing the murder has deniability, as there is no dead body to show the victim is actually dead.
However, there's another possibility that might explained sudden disappearances. Murdering someone and hiding the whole action in contrary to what many people think is not easy and simple, in the contrary, it is quite expensive and complicated. It's more easier to forcefully (or maybe through gentle persuasion first) deport someone outside of the country and then force them to stay silent by blackmailing them (like threatened to made the life of their families back home difficult, revealing the person's deepest darkest secret, and so on). This might have explained the lack of dead bodies that belong to missing person. Many people bought the idea that a group, organization, or even a government prefer to done a Forced disappearance through murder due the fact that they never actually murdered anyone and lacking the experiences and the knowledge of the complexity of murdering someone, let alone covering a murder.
Murder is usually used as a last result or as a political move (like providing an excuse for a human right organization to defame and weaken a particular government, or as a trigger to cause two or more parties to fight each others).
Many missing person in contrary to what some thing might have been just simply removed out of the countries instead of being murdered. Many human right victims might have living leisurely in a foreign countries instead of being dead.
Another possibility is that the person might have just simply disappear, without any known reason or way.
Lingustic considerations People who have been forced to disappear are frequently referred to as "disappeared", they've been "disappeared by" whomever, and those responsible are charged with "disappearing" him or her. "Disappear", normally a intransitive verb, becomes transitive in this use. Some people uncomfortable with this term prefer to say that someone "was made to disappear". Both phrases are usually considered doublespeak euphemisms.
Well known incidents The method first gained wide use in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge. When someone was purged, secret police (in this case the GPU or OGPU of the NKVD) would take them away to either a police building or a remote location to be killed, usually in the night. For important people the following may have happened: artists would airbrush them out of photographs; books, records, and histories would be recalled, rewritten, or redacted; pictures, busts, and statues would be taken down; people would be discouraged from talking about them; and the government would never mention them again. It was as if they never existed. Some victims were sent to Gulags as forced labor, which would make them as forced labors and not murder victims.
During World War II, Nazi Germany set up secret police forces including branches of the Gestapo in occupied countries, who they used to hunt down known or suspected dissidents or partisans. This tactic was given the name Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) to describe those who disappeared after being arrested by Nazi forces without any warning. The Nazis also applied this cruel policy against political opponents within Germany. Most victims were killed on the spot or left to die in concentration camps.
During Argentina's Dirty War, political dissidents were forced to jump out of airplanes far out over the Atlantic Ocean. Obviously, their bodies were never found. Without any dead bodies, the government could deny they had been killed. People murdered in this way (and in others) are today referred to as "the disappeared" (los desaparecidos). They were the inspiration for a U2 song of the same name.
In what is probably the best known non-governmental case, the mafia is said to have "disappeared" U.S. trade-unionist Jimmy Hoffa -? killing him and doing away with his body in a way that ensured it was never found.
Disappearances in human rights law In international human rights law, disappearances at the hand of the state have been codified as enforced or forced disappearances. For example, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court defines enforced disappearance as a crime against humanity, and the practice is specifically addressed by the OAS's Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons.
Disappearances work on two levels: not only do they effectively silence those opposition members who are disappeared, they also sow uncertainty and terror in the wider community in general, thus silencing other opposition voices, current and potential alike. Disappearances entail the violation of a series of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms. For the disappeared person, these include the right to liberty, the right to personal security and humane treatment (including freedom from torture), the right to a fair trial, to legal counsel, and to equal protection under the law, the right of presumption of innocence, et cetera. Their families, who often spend the rest of their lives in fruitless searches for the disappeared persons remains and for emotional closure, also become victims of the disappearance's effects.
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