ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to reflect on the challenges that arise when investigating and prosecuting cases of enforced disappearance, from the experience of the author, a former Spanish investigating judge. Towards the end of the 1990s, he carried out several investigations under the principle of universal jurisdiction, such as the cases against the military regimes of both Chile and Argentina, including the Operation Condor, a coordinated effort by the several South American countries to exterminate and disappear thousands of political opponents. Ten years later, the author opened the first, and so far, the only investigation of the crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship, in which more than 140,000 people were forcibly disappeared. In all these cases, the author was able to experience first-hand the challenges of tackling impunity for the most heinous human rights violation, which condemns the disappeared person never to be found and his or her families to a state of never-ending suffering.
