The UN General Assembly is to vote this week on setting up an independent institution on missing persons in Syria.
At the height of the civil war in Syria, Ahmad Helmi, an activist and human rights defender, became one of the many victims of “enforced disappearance.”
Currently, more than 12 years since the onset of the Syrian war, about 100,000 Syrians are still missing.
Together with other Syrian survivors of enforced disappearance and relatives of those still missing, he has been trying to raise awareness about the issue.
“We published a study of our findings in May 2021 and presented it to the United Nations General Assembly,” Helmi said, adding that it has also been backed by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
In March, Guterres highlighted that “the crisis of missing persons in Syria is crushing in its enormity” and called on the General Assembly to establish an international mechanism to address cases of enforced disappearance in Syria.
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