ABSTRACT
The author presents and comments the most relevant articles of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance as examples of rigorous law coupled with compassion and attention for the ‘human factor’. While acknowledging the limitations that the law may have in front of the extent of human devastation caused by enforced disappearance, he guides us in an excursus of the history and novelty of the Convention. The Convention succeeded in defining in legal terms the undefinable horror of an enforced disappearance, by spelling out its components, as an individual crime and as a crime against humanity. It qualified the unqualifiable in the broadest terms: the authors of the crime are all those who participate and cannot hide behind due obedience, and the victims are the disappeared and all those who suffered harm. It spelled out the obligation of States to ensure the right to obtain collective and individual reparation, in the understanding that the ultimate damage is unrepairable. The author presents law as an instrument of progress and the Convention as the result of the struggle across generations for the search of the disappeared as well as a testimony of human solidarity.
